


Forgotten But Not Gone

by KouriArashi



Series: The Sum of Its Parts [11]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Amnesia, Angst, F/M, Family, M/M, Magic, Multi, Mystery, Pack Dynamics, Pack Feels, Stilinski Family Feels, Werewolf Hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3286721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KouriArashi/pseuds/KouriArashi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles starts losing his memories and nobody can figure out why or how to stop it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hai there! It's part 12 of TSOIP! Isn't life crazy?
> 
> This has lots of amnesia and magic and mental de-aging and will probably get pretty angsty in sections but you know you can always count on me to fix things up. =D
> 
> Enjoy!

 

It’s not unusual for Stiles to wake up confused. Actually, he wakes up confused a lot of mornings. He sleeps in multiple places, and sometimes he needs drugs to achieve and maintain actual unconsciousness. He has bad dreams and often wakes up in the middle of the night. So all things considered, it’s fairly typical for him to wake up wondering where he is, how he got there, what time it is, or all of the above.

So when he wakes up on an only-vaguely-familiar bed and thinks ‘that’s weird’ he doesn’t make much of a note of it. He sits up and yawns, stretches, rubs a hand over his head. Had he fallen asleep in the guest room at the den? Shouldn’t he be at school? He could have sworn that he was at school. He’s still getting used to the new apartment.

He’s still pondering this when he sees a bright green piece of paper folded up on the nightstand next to him. It says ‘Stiles: Read Me’ in familiar handwriting. His own handwriting. Which is even weirder, because he doesn’t remember writing it. He picks it up and unfolds it.

‘Hi Stiles, it’s Stiles. You’ve been having some trouble with memory loss so I’ve started writing these every night so you’ll be less confused in the morning. You probably have a lot of questions. Let’s take them in order so you don’t have to bother everyone downstairs.

_Shouldn’t I be at school?_ No. School’s out for the year. Today is May fifteenth.

_How can it be May already?_ It seems like every night we’re forgetting a little more. We’re not sure how much in a night, maybe a month or two.

_Where’s Derek?_ He’s probably downstairs. When you woke up with the pack you were upsetting them with your flailing and panicking, so you’ve been sequestered. Sorry about that, buddy.

_Is he okay?_ He’s fine, everyone’s fine, aside from being massively freaked out.

_What’s causing this?_ We’re not sure yet. It has to be magic of some kind, but we haven’t worked out how it would be happening.

Those are the basics. Go downstairs and the pack will give you the details.’

Stiles folds the letter and frowns. He fumbles around and finds his phone on the nightstand, swiping his finger across the screen and looking at the date. May fifteenth, just like the note had said. How can it be May fifteenth? It feels like school only just started. Had he really lost almost an entire year of time?

He crawls into his clothes and heads downstairs, in search of answers and breakfast.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

At first, they hadn’t realized what was going on. Stiles seemed to be forgetting some things he had said or done recently, but he was stressed, it was their last week of the semester, he was taking his finals. They hadn’t figured out that something was _wrong_ until the a few days into their summer break, where Stiles had woken up panicking because he didn’t know why he was in Beacon Hills when he should have been at school.

“I have finals!” he protested to Derek, who was just blinking at him in confusion.

“Stiles, you did all your finals last week,” he said.

Stiles blinked back. “I did?”

He didn’t remember. And when Derek had sat him down and carefully questioned him, they realized that he had lost nearly three weeks of time.

They took him to the doctor. Except for being confused about the date, he did fine on the mental status exam. They did an EEG and an MRI, and both of them came back perfectly normal. There were no signs of head trauma, no fever, no new medications, no evidence of a stroke. He was given a clean bill of health and no answers.

When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t remember who Malia was, or that Peter had come back for a few days, or that they had been to Faerie.

They took him to Deaton. He put him in the copper circle in his basement and did a charm to dispel any magic that had been done to him. His memories didn’t return, but Deaton had been hopeful that he would at least stop losing time.

When he woke up the next morning, he was excited about the start of their spring semester.

They did the dispel charm again and then had him sleep in Deaton’s office, surrounded by mountain ash.

When he woke up the next morning, he was looking forward to Christmas break.

They sat down and did the math. He was losing a month or more every night, and they had no idea how to stop it.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

The problem, Derek said, wasn’t just that Stiles was losing his memory and they were all freaked out about it. The problem was that it was going to leave them, effectively, without an alpha. At the rate he was losing time, within a week, he would forget that he was their alpha, and one more night after that, and he would forget that werewolves existed at all.

He hears Stiles stirring upstairs, and digs his claws into the counter, reminding himself that he can’t go upstairs. The previous two mornings, he had scared the wits out of Stiles by pouncing on him as soon as he was awake, demanding ‘what day is it? did you forget again?’ until Stiles was practically hiding in the bathroom, threatening to stay there until Derek calmed down.

It’s worse for him – for all of them – than it is for Stiles. Because every time Stiles forgets, for him, it’s the first time. But for the rest of them, it’s a slowly building panic. While Stiles tackles every day as if this is a new problem, the rest of the pack are growing steadily more and more freaked out. It had been Stiles’ decision the previous night that he was going to start sleeping in the guest room and leaving a letter to himself to brief himself on the situation, and the others should stay at their homes, with their families.

For now, Stiles is still the alpha, and what he says goes. Derek gets the sense that Stiles is trying to make decisions now, plan ahead now, in case he’s incapable later. And that frightens Derek more than anything else.

So he forces himself to take a deep breath and look up as Stiles enters the kitchen. He’s showered and dressed and looks normal, but the fact that he didn’t run downstairs shouting ‘hallelujah, I remember everything!’ means that he probably lost another month or so. He sees the questioning look on Derek’s face and says, flatly, “I’m back to about September.”

Derek lets out a breath. “You remember Cora?”

“Yeah. And everything that happened with Deucalion. It feels like we left for school a couple weeks ago.” Stiles rubs a hand over his hair. “Run me through it.”

“Okay,” Derek says, and starts telling him what’s happened so far. He tells him about the day in the hospital, which both of them detested. Stiles hates hospitals as a general rule, and this set of tests reminded him very much of his mother. He never talks about her very much, but Derek gets the impression that she had some similar things done when she was diagnosed with the disease that had taken her life.

So that day had been long, tense, and uncomfortable. And when everything had come back clear, the doctor had said it was probably stress related, he just finished his first year of school, take some time off to relax and odds were it would come back to him.

Stiles frowns as Derek sums up the fact that Deaton had done both a dispelling and had him sleep in mountain ash. “If neither of those worked, how the hell could it be magic?” he asks. “And I have the protection charm, too.”

“We don’t know. _He_ doesn’t know.” Derek takes another deep breath and reminds himself that he has to stay calm, for Stiles’ sake. But it had shaken him to see the Druid/veterinarian so clearly puzzled by something. “He tossed out some theories, but none of them seem likely. As for the protection spell, yesterday you said you were going to e-mail Rebekah about it. Has she replied?”

“Oh, that’s what this is,” Stiles says, pulling out his phone. “Yeah, she e-mailed me back saying she would want to see the charm just to make sure it was intact and had retained its potency. Road trip, I guess.”

Derek nods. A road trip is good. Everything they think of that’s something to _do_ , some lead to follow, keeps him calm. “Okay. Let’s head to Los Angeles, then.”

“Let me call my dad,” Stiles says, and Derek watches him as he pours himself a cup of coffee and dials. “Hey, Dad, it’s – no, no dice. September.” A long pause. “Okay, well, Rebekah wants to check out my protection spell and see if anyone’s tampered with it, so Derek and I are heading to LA for the day. We’ll be back around dinner time. No, I feel perfectly safe to drive. Okay. Love-you-bye.” He hangs up the phone and turns to Derek. “Breakfast?”

“Sure,” Derek says, grinding his teeth so hard that he’s surprised they don’t break. Seeing Stiles so cavalier about this when he’s literally one step away from breaking down is making everything worse. But it’s still somewhat of a relief to see Stiles in his element, whipping together a batch of scrambled eggs and pancakes, humming to himself.

Derek tells himself – as he tells himself every hour at least – that even if Stiles loses his memories, he’ll still be _Stiles_. He won’t lose his alpha. He will _never_ lose his alpha.

“This is some _Fifty First Dates_ shit, huh,” Stiles says, his mouth full of eggs.

Derek snorts into his coffee. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“If I’m back in, like, September, now . . .” Stiles stops and considers. “I’m losing more each night, aren’t I.”

Derek closes his eyes. He didn’t want to go into this, didn’t want to scare Stiles. But he asked, and he can’t bring himself to lie. “Yeah. At first it was only a few weeks at a time. Then it was a month. And if you think it’s September now, that means you lost nearly three months in one night. We can assume the trend will continue.”

“Yeah.” Stiles is quiet, and Derek knows exactly what he’s thinking, and what he’s going to say next. He knows because Stiles has done the exact same thing the past three mornings in a row. Done the math and the calculations, figured out how much time he has before he forgets being the alpha, forgets the pack, forgets _Derek_. “That means – ”

“Don’t say it,” Derek interrupts. “Jesus, Stiles, just – don’t say it, okay?”

Stiles looks momentarily surprised, but then figures out what Derek means. He looks away. “I’ve said it every morning, huh?”

Derek rubs a hand over his face. “Yeah.”

Stiles shoves his plate aside. “Let’s head to Los Angeles.”

It’s not exactly a short drive, and Derek knows that Stiles being gone for the entire day is going to set their already-anxious pack on edge. “We should take a few people with us,” he says, and when Stiles gives him a questioning look, he says, “They haven’t had a lot of pack time lately. We don’t know what’s going on, so . . . we’re being cautious, that’s all.”

Stiles nods. “Makes sense. Let’s bring . . . no.” He chews on his lower lip and then looks at Derek. “Who needs it the most?”

Derek thinks back over the past few days, who’s been the most edgy. “Lydia,” he says slowly. “She doesn’t like puzzles she can’t solve. She’s spent a lot of time with her head buried in books and . . .” He doesn’t bother to finish the sentence. What does it matter? Stiles will forget it by tomorrow. “And Isaac,” he finishes. Isaac has always been very dependent on pack, since he has no family support system to fall back on, like Boyd or Mac.

“Okay, tell Lydia to drive over to Scott’s – Isaac is at Scott’s? – and we’ll pick them up there.”

Derek nods and gets on the phone. He exchanges a few words with Lydia and then with Isaac, tries not to think about the palpable relief in their voices at the idea of spending some time with Stiles. About half an hour later, they’re on the road. Stiles has put some rock and roll on the radio, but he keeps it down.

“Now, we’re _sure_ it’s not a medical issue, right?” he says, and Derek closes his eyes and fights the intense urge to scream.

Lydia is the one who answers. “Yes. And not just because all your testing came back clean. Neurology is a fascinating, complex subject. If you were losing memories randomly, in chunks, or if they were coming and going – then maybe. But this . . . gradual progression backwards. Nothing natural causes that.”

“Okay.” Stiles chews on his lip. “Memory and knowledge are usually two separate systems, right?” he asks.

“Yes, and before you can ask me to quiz you on some things that you learned last semester . . .” Lydia lets out a breath. “You’re losing knowledge, too.”

“Shit. I hope I don’t have to take the classes over again,” Stiles says.

“Well, you won’t, because we’re going to figure out what’s causing this and then we’re going to fix it,” Lydia says firmly.

“Right,” Stiles says, and nobody says what they’re all thinking, and have been thinking for days: even if they can find a way to stop this from progressing, there’s no guarantee that he’ll get any of his memories back.

“Turn up the music,” Isaac says, when the silence grows unbearable. Derek complies.

Stiles had gotten up early enough that they reach Los Angeles in the early afternoon. They go through a drive-through to grab some lunch and then head for Harvest, the store that Rebekah works out of. She greets them cordially, gives the nervous werewolf a reassuring look, and leans forward to examine the charm that Stiles wears around his neck, rather than asking him to take it off.

“Well, the magic is sound,” she says, in her creaky voice. “I don’t sense any sort of tampering.”

“Can they just . . . become ineffective?” Stiles asks. “I mean, when you met us you asked a whole bunch of questions about us, and sometimes the answers change. Like, I was a virgin when you made me this, and I’m not anymore.”

“The spell is magically linked to you,” she explains. “As you grow and change, the spell grows and changes with you. So nothing like that should cause a problem. Now, some protection spells do lose potency over time . . . but not mine. And certainly not so quickly. Even a mediocre protection charm will last up to a decade or so.”

“Even if the person has endured magical attacks?” Lydia asks.

Rebekah waves a hand and says, “It might degrade faster under those circumstances, but if that had happened, I would be able to sense the problem.”

Stiles thinks about all of this for a long minute, and Derek wishes he could pace. There are ways around protection spells, sure, but all of them, Stiles in particular, are very, very careful about avoiding them. He tries to limit his attachment to any physical possessions. The only thing that he uses enough that it might actually be something with magic value is his phone, and he still has that. All of his childhood treasures and photographs are in a locked safe at the sheriff’s station, and Sheriff Stilinski says they’re all accounted for.

As for something physical, it’s unlikely. He never brushes his hair or cuts his nails anywhere but their apartment at school, or the den. When he needs a haircut, Lydia gives him one, and they burn all the remnants afterwards. They’re careful to the point of paranoia, primarily because they’ve had a few bad experiences with sorcerers and nobody has any desire to go through something like that – or something like this – again.

“You never take it off, right?” Rebekah asks.

“Never,” Stiles says. “I wear it when I’m sleeping, when I’m in the shower, always.”

“And you never took it off in the past? Not for any reason?”

Stiles thinks back. “I don’t think so? I guess it’s possible. I mean, I could have done it and then not even remember,” he says, shaking his head. “Do you think it’s possible I took it off and someone cast some sort of, of timed spell on me?”

“Anything’s possible,” Rebekah says.

Isaac leans over and says, “But Dr. Deaton did a dispel on you, right? That should have cancelled out any magic that was done on you previously.”

Rebekah frowns and says, “Yes, that is correct.” She sighs and adds, “But one thing to always remember about magic is that _nothing_ is set in stone. Protection spells can be circumvented with simple, raw power. I made that spell for you, and I’m powerful. But there are people and other creatures out there who are more powerful than I am.”

“But then how does it get through the mountain ash circle?” Lydia asks. “Magic _can’t_ get through a mountain ash circle.”

“Were you alone in the mountain ash circle?” Rebekah asks.

Stiles looks at Derek for the answer, since he doesn’t remember. Derek shakes his head. “No. It was at Deaton’s clinic. He was there. So was I, and Scott, and I think Jackson was there for at least part of the night, doing stuff with the animals. He’s still working there over the summer.”

“Plus Deaton has any number of magical artifacts and foci in his possession,” Rebekah says. “That could have been part of it.”

“So put him in a circle by himself,” Lydia says.

“That’s the next thing I would try, yes,” Rebekah says.

“What if I stay up all night?” Stiles asks. “It’s happening while I’m sleeping, so maybe I just shouldn’t sleep.”

“You can’t stay awake forever,” Lydia says.

“Well, no, but I ought to be able to manage one night,” Stiles says, but then shakes his head. “We have to be methodical about this, right? Because if we try two things at once, and it works out, we won’t know what the difference was. So I guess I’ll sleep in a mountain ash circle tonight. Fun, fun.”

“Yeah,” Derek says quietly, trying not to think about the fact that if it _doesn’t_ work, it’s another night wasted. If it doesn’t work, it’s another month, three months, who-knows-how-many-months _lost_. If it doesn’t work, when Stiles wakes up in the morning he won’t know who Cora is, or why he has a round scar the size of a bullet on his abdomen. If it doesn’t work, Stiles won’t remember the words his grandmother said to him that changed his attitude about the things he’s had to do.

If it doesn’t work, it’s just another night closer to when Stiles forgets him.

But Derek doesn’t say anything of that. He just nods and agrees because it’s a reasonable plan and Rebekah knows what she’s talking about. They drive back to Beacon Hills, they get dinner, they stop and check in with other pack members, giving everyone some alpha time. Then they go back to the den with Allison and Scott.

“Nothing in the circle with you at all,” Derek reminds Stiles.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stiles says, grumbling. “No pillow, no blanket, no glass of water. I might as well just try to stay up, because I’m sure not going to fall asleep easily.” He’s stripping off his clothes as he speaks. “I don’t have any magical marks on me anywhere, do I?”

Derek glances up at this. It’s something they haven’t thought of, haven’t checked. “Put your arms up,” he says, and Stiles does. Derek circles him slowly, undisturbed by Stiles’ nudity, only looking for anything out of place. But there’s nothing. “No. You’re clean.”

“Okay.” Stiles kicks his pants aside and lets Allison surround him with mountain ash. Then he plops onto the ground. “Well, you guys might as well keep me entertained until I fall asleep.”

Nobody really wants to talk to Stiles about all the things he’s forgotten, because summing them up over and over again is getting old at this point. Scott brings the television out of the rec room and puts it on the living room floor so they can watch a movie. When it’s over, Stiles is still full of energy and getting somewhat twitchy. They put on another, and then another.

“You should get some sleep,” Scott tells him.

“Dude, look,” Stiles says, “I’m naked, sitting on a tile floor, with no cushions or pillows. Would _you_ be able to sleep?”

“I guess not,” Scott admits, somewhat reluctantly.

They put on another movie. Stiles is curled up on the floor, looking only moderately miserable. Derek just watches him. His eyes are bright and focused on the movie, and Derek can practically see the gears turning behind them, as he continues to try to work out what’s going on.

He almost misses it when his eyes go a little vague, and it doesn’t occur to him that it’s important. It’s late, he’s tired, and despite his discomfort, he’s eventually going to fall asleep. Stiles can fall asleep just about anywhere, in any position, so sleeping on a floor without a pillow isn’t out of the bounds of reason.

But when Stiles gives a sudden twitch and then his head jerks as he tries to regain his bearings, Derek demands, “What? What is it?”

Stiles looks around the living room, bewildered, and asks, “Why am I sleeping on the floor?”

Derek looks at Scott and says, “You explain it,” and walks out of the room before he can break down completely.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: So what do you want out of an amnesia fic?
> 
> My girlfriend: Just fuck me up!

 

Nobody in the pack gets much sleep, so it’s mid-morning by the time they make it to Deaton’s. Stiles has been up all night, because he was afraid that if he fell asleep, he would forget even _more_ , and the lack of sleep is making him punchy and exacerbating his confusion. He knows he’s lost time but keeps accidentally asking questions about things that were going on at the time of his last memory.

“Shit, what do my grandparents think about all this?” he asks, as they pile into the car.

“Your grandparents aren’t here,” Scott says patiently. “That was last year. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right. Sorry.”

Scott waves this off. He’s tense and nervous, they all are, but he’s beginning to realize that someone is going to have to hold the pack together and that’s not going to be Derek. He’s done okay at keeping himself from freaking out so far, but he’s gradually losing it, and until Stiles gets better, Derek won’t either.

That morning before breakfast, Scott had a quiet word with Allison and Boyd. He put Allison in charge of defense and any other threats that ping their radar. Boyd is in charge of making sure everyone is handling domestic matters. Scott takes charge of Derek, who’s taken charge of Stiles. It’s not the best system in the world, but it will get them through this. It will have to.

Derek handles about two minutes of Deaton’s quiet nodding and lack of commentary before he finally flips out. “What is happening?” he demands. “Say something useful for once in your life!”

Deaton doesn’t react to Derek’s shouting. “Derek, I would love to have an easy explanation to give you. But I don’t. I don’t know how this is happening.”

Derek gives a low, buzzing growl, and Scott takes him by the arm and pulls him back a little. He’s anxious himself, because he knows Deaton better, and he can tell that Deaton is flustered. Not even flustered, but _baffled_. He’s truly at a loss, and that shakes Scott more than anything else.

“Okay,” he says, forcing himself to be rational, “let’s take this from the top. He was by himself in the mountain ash circle, so logically, the magic had to be in there with him. Right?”

“Yes,” Deaton says, a little slowly.

“There was nothing – ” Derek starts to insist.

Scott grips his arm tighter and casts an appealing look at Stiles. The alpha moves closer to Derek, putting a hand on his back, rubbing his thumb over the back of Derek’s neck. Derek subsides a little, although he still looks unhappy. “So,” Scott continues, “someone had to do the magic ahead of time and put it on some sort of timer.”

“Except Deaton did a charm to dispel any magic that had been put on me,” Stiles says.

“Well, Rebekah said that nothing was set in stone,” Scott persists. “Maybe whoever did the spell was, you know . . . more powerful. So remnants of it stayed behind. That’s a possibility, right?”

Deaton grimaces. “I don’t mean to sound conceited, but, well. It’s unlikely. I know most of the Druids in the area, and I’ve met a great number of them over the course of my life. And, well . . . I’ve only met one or two who were even close to being as powerful as I am. Since the Druidic Council was formed, we’ve put in effort to evaluate everyone. There are probably only two people in the entire country who outrank me in terms of raw power, and neither of them would have any reason to do this.”

“What about a power-up?” Stiles says. “Like Stone was going to do? What if someone made some sort of pact with a, a demon or something like that?”

Deaton grimaces. “That’s a possibility,” he says. “But if that’s the case, it doesn’t give us any answers or any options.”

Derek is clearly about to start shouting again, so Scott says, “Is there a way to track the magic back to the source? Now that we know when it’s happening? It’s not just ‘while he’s asleep’, it happened at a very specific time. And it must be on some sort of timer because he was inside mountain ash, so maybe we can follow it.”

There’s a pause, and then Deaton nods. “We can try,” he says. It’s his usual noncommittal answer, and Stiles doesn’t look thrilled with it, but they know better than to try to press him for any sort of certainty.

They spend most of the day buried in books. They’ve spent a lot of days doing that lately, but at least now they’re looking for something specific, something that might actually exist. They come up with a number of different spells that allow magic to be tracked and spend some time testing them out. Nothing works, and Deaton theorizes that they’ll only be able to do it while the magic is actually happening.

“We actually don’t want him in mountain ash this time,” he says, “because then it would cut off our spell. So why don’t we go back to your house, Stiles?”

“Sure, okay,” Stiles says.

“So we only get one shot at this?” Derek asks, clearly anxious. “If it doesn’t work, we’d have to wait twenty-four hours before we can try again?”

Deaton nods. “And we won’t have a very big window. How long do you think it took the spell to take hold?”

“It can’t have been long,” Derek says. “Ten seconds, maybe.”

“So I’ll only have time to try one spell, maybe two if I’m lucky,” Deaton says, and considers this for another moment while the others exchange frowns. They’ve found over a dozen spells to track down magic-in-action, and had hoped they would be able to try at least half of them. “What do you say to letting Jackson do one? He would need to practice a few times, and his focus isn’t good enough to do more than one in such a short time, but it would be one more.”

Scott watches as Stiles mulls this over, and keeps his opinion to himself. He would go for it, but Stiles has always had a more contentious relationship with Jackson. Scott has actually been talking to Jackson a little more lately. He had gone to a separate college from the rest of them, in Denver, and he’d had a bad case of big-fish-little-pond syndrome.

In Beacon Hills, Jackson had always been the big fish. Even after Stiles had become the alpha, even after the pack, he had still been the most popular, best with the girls, captain of the swim team, homecoming king, et cetera. He was unquestionably the best at lacrosse. Scott and Stiles could rival him, but they had needed a supernatural boost to do so. Jackson just had the raw talent. Scott thinks that had comforted him sometimes.

But at a huge school, he was just one more guy in the middle of the pack. Charming good looks and athletic skill could only take a guy so far. Unsurprisingly, Jackson had been homesick. Scott and Allison had run into him over their Christmas break and struck up a cautious friendship. Danny, of course,  is still Jackson’s best friend, and they e-mail and skype all the time. Scott had started talking to him as well. Aside from Danny, he’s spent the most time with Jackson, since they often wind up working at Deaton’s clinic at the same time.

It’s important, for Jackson’s sake, that he has friends. Fighting an addiction is hard, and Jackson will be fighting his for the rest of his life. He needs support. Having his parents, having a new little sister, it had helped him. But Scott wants to make sure that Jackson has all the help he can get. And he thinks showing Jackson that they believe in him will be another important part of that support.

So he’s pleased when Stiles says, “Yeah, okay. Good thinking. You wanna give him a call and have him meet us back at my place?”

“Sure,” Deaton says, getting out his phone.

They get some dinner and settle back to the Stilinski house. Jackson meets them there with his everpresent scowl and with Wilma trotting along at his side. The three-legged dog accepts petting from Stiles, and rubs her face against Derek’s thigh, seeming to sense his distress. Derek sighs a little and scratches the dog behind the ears.

Deaton sits down with Jackson and goes over the spell with them. Then he casts a few simple charms to let Jackson practice. It’s interesting to watch, because Jackson looks subtly _different_ when he’s doing magic. The sulky look finally disappears from his face, and he’s focused, absorbed. Stiles watches him suspiciously.

Scott wonders what magic feels like. He knows that Stiles had worried about it, worried that he would cross lines he didn’t want to cross, become somebody he didn’t want to be. But he’s never felt it himself. He doesn’t have anything to compare it too, either. Stiles says it’s like a cross between being electrified and having an orgasm, which sounds somewhat unpleasant to Scott, if he’s going to be honest. He’s seen other people who compared it to a high from cocaine, but that’s not exactly a helpful comparison for him.

Since Deaton has said that the black magic is more about intentions than anything else, Scott thinks Jackson would be okay if he got his powers back. He has things to anchor him now; he’s confident in his parents’ love for him in a way that he wasn’t before. He thinks that’s hard for Stiles to understand. Despite all of Stiles’ intelligence, he’ll never understand that feeling of not being wanted by the people who are supposed to dish out unconditional love. He lost his mother, true, but he always had her love. Of course, so did Jackson; it just took him longer to realize that.

“Okay, I got it,” Jackson says, about an hour later.

“You’re sure?” Derek asks.

“Yeah,” Jackson says, glowering at him.

“It’s a really small window,” Derek persists.

“Dude,” Jackson says, “I got it.”

Scott watches as Stiles reaches out to rub Derek’s back, almost absently. Derek relaxes in small increments, leaning into his touch. Scott isn’t looking forward to the day when Stiles doesn’t have the same touch with Derek as he does now. He’s lost about a year, which isn’t a huge deal. But the more he loses, the less he’s going to realize how heavily Derek depends on him.

“Let’s put on a movie,” he says, wanting to distract Derek.

“I want to check in with the pack real quick,” Stiles says, getting up and heading out of the room. He takes out his phone and goes onto the back porch. Derek’s gaze follows him, but his body stays planted on the sofa, which is a good sign. It takes about half an hour for Stiles to call every pack member and make sure they’re doing okay. By then, Sheriff Stilinski is home from his shift. He gets Stiles in a bear hug that nearly lifts him off the floor, and they settle down with the movie.

The previous night, the spell had happened at midnight. Stiles falls asleep almost as soon as the movie is on, which isn’t surprised since he didn’t sleep the night before, and slumps against Derek’s shoulder. Derek cuddles him close.

“How will we know when it’s happening?” Derek asks.

“I’ll know,” Deaton says. Scott expects Derek to growl about that, but he doesn’t. He just clutches Stiles a little tighter and waits.

As the minutes to midnight slip by, Scott feels himself growing more tense. He can’t watch the movie, but is constantly looking between Stiles and Deaton and even Jackson. Deaton is calm and poised; Stiles is sound asleep. Jackson is the only one who seems to be actually watching the movie. But at exactly 11:59, Deaton suddenly looks up. “Get ready,” he says. Jackson’s head jerks around, and Scott sees him swallow nervously, but he nods.

Nothing on Stiles changes. He continues to sleep peacefully. But Deaton says, “Now,” and draws a quick symbol in the air. Then another. Jackson’s eyes are closed, one finger pressed into the center of his forehead.

Moments later, a bunch of silver sparks shoot up from Deaton’s hand. “Whoa, _cool_ ,” Scott says, despite himself. They whirl around in a miniature tornado, spread out into the entire room –

and then abruptly dissipate.

“What does that mean?” Derek asks, as Stiles stirs and mumbles something sleepily. Deaton traces the symbol again, but nothing happens.

“Our window is closed,” he says, and turns to Jackson. “Did you get anything?”

Jackson shakes his head. “Well, kinda,” he says. “I mean, the spell took, but I don’t think it worked, because it didn’t go anywhere. I should have felt a tug, and I didn’t.”

“Mine reacted the same way.” Deaton is frowning.

Derek is clearly about to spit nails. “What does that _mean_?” he demands, and Scott squeezes his shoulder, reminding him to be quiet, that Stiles will be confused enough when he wakes, let alone if he wakes up into this chaos. They’re lucky that he’s a heavy sleeper when he’s worn out.

“It means that the spell couldn’t be traced back to the caster,” Deaton says.

“Yeah, I get that, but why _not_ ,” Derek asks.

“Probably because, as we theorized, the trigger for the spell is somehow . . . integral to Stiles.” Deaton shakes his head. “Whatever it is, it was put on him long before today, and now it’s self-activating. Our tracking spell tried to look for a source, but all it found was Stiles himself.”

Stiles stirs again. He opens his eyes, blinks slowly a few times, and then smiles sleepily up at Derek, oblivious to everything else. “Hey, Der,” he murmurs, rolls over in Derek’s lap, and goes back to sleep.

“What do we do now?” Scott asks.

“We get some sleep,” Sheriff Stilinski says, from the corner where he’s quietly been watching. “All of us. You too, Derek. We’ll start fresh in the morning. We’re not having any luck figuring out how this is happening, and we’re not having any luck figuring out how to stop it. That means we have to find out who did it, and make them stop it for us.”

Derek looks over at him, then nods. “Okay,” he says. He stands up, hefting Stiles with him, and heads up the stairs. The others watch him go in silence.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

  
Once things are explained to Stiles the next morning, they head for the Argent house. Between Chris and Deaton, they manage to compile a list of the various people that they’ve pissed off, and the various people who might be capable of such a thing. Stiles doesn’t remember some of them, but he agrees to call Oblivion just to make sure Jennifer Blake is still imprisoned, even though he has no idea who Jennifer Blake is.

They divide the list into parts and everyone tackles different things. Derek and Stiles are going through the list and e-mailing or calling every other werewolf or friendly monster they’ve ever dealt with. Danny and Mac are trying to track down some of the people electronically while Chris and Allison talk to their hunter contacts. Scott and Isaac help Deaton make calls to some of the Druids he knows to track down people who might be capable of doing these spells. Erica and Boyd head to the police station with Sheriff Stilinski to help him sort through all the information he can get through official channels. Lydia and Jake keep everything organized.

It takes days, and all they come up with in the end is a handful of people who can be ruled out, and a much larger handful of people who can’t be. They don’t want to start contacting their enemies to ask if they’ve been up to anything, because there’s no faster way to invite an attack than to broadcast a weakness. Until they can narrow it down further, Chris says, they shouldn’t let anybody know what’s happening.

“We need more time,” Derek says, trying not to panic, because they’re getting close to the point of no return, the point where Stiles won’t know him anymore.

“What about distance?” Stiles asks. Deaton gives him a questioning look. The three of them are sitting around the clinic on a Saturday mid-morning, brainstorming ways to keep Stiles from losing more memories while they try to sort it out. “Well, you’ve talked some about things being outside your range. Sebastian Stone had to come to Beacon Hills to play with me; he couldn’t fuck with me from across the country.”

“Given Sebastian, he probably could have,” Deaton says. “He just wouldn’t have considered it entertaining. But you do have a point. I don’t know if it would help, Stiles. The fact that the magic seems to be originating from inside you might mean that it wouldn’t. But if he has to trigger it somehow, then it’s possible that it would.”

“Well, anything’s worth a try at this point, right?” Stiles says. “Since we haven’t come up with anything else.”

Deaton nods. “Yes, there’s a chance it could work.”

Derek already has his phone out. “I’ll get us tickets.”

“You hate flying,” Stiles says, blinking at him. “I think we could drive far enough – I mean, if we got on I-80 and headed east for ten hours, we could get as far as – ”

“No,” Derek growls. “The further, the better. We’ll fly.”

“Ohhhhh-kay,” Stiles says, seeing that arguing won’t do any good. “I’ll go pack us an overnight bag.”

Derek is still scowling, and Deaton reaches over and squeezes his shoulder, sensing the fear underneath the anger. Derek shrugs his hand off and marches out of the clinic behind Stiles, grumbling at his phone.

An hour later, they’re at the airport, and boarding a flight to Boston. Stiles has only flown a few times in his life, and never first-class. “I didn’t even realize you were getting us first class tickets,” he says, sinking into the seat, which seems enormous compared to his memory of coach seats. “Is that a _bar_? Holy shit! Am I old enough to drink?”

Derek tries to smile, but it doesn’t make it very far. “No. You’re only twenty.”

“Aw, man,” Stiles says, bouncing in his seat. Derek tries not to notice how _young_ he seems. He hadn’t noticed Stiles growing up when it had happened gradually. But to have him be set back in time like this, it’s unnerving. It’s not just that he remembers being seventeen, it’s that he’s _acting_ like he’s seventeen. And somehow that scares Derek more than anything else.

Stiles buckles in and asks for a can of Coke and makes a dozen airline jokes when they give him the entire can instead of just a tiny glass. “This is amazing,” he says, kicking his feet back and forth.

Once they’re up to cruising altitude, he takes his laptop out and starts playing around on it, and Derek tries not to notice that he’s not as good at the games as he used to be, that his skills are degrading along with everything else. He doesn’t know what to say to that, doesn’t know what he’ll do if this doesn’t work.

Stiles sleeps for the second half of the flight, while Derek stares out moodily into the sky, and he’s starving when he wakes up. “We could grab something,” Derek says, as they land.

“Airport food, yuck,” Stiles says. “Let’s at least go to a restaurant.”

“I want to get on the road,” Derek says.

“Seriously?” Stiles says. “It’s nearly nine PM. We’re all the way to Boston. What does it matter if we drive a few hours north?”

Derek tries to unclench his jaw and says, “It matters to me.”

“If you say so,” Stiles says, shaking his head, and Derek can’t tell if he’s being accommodating just because he’s humoring Derek, or if he’s being accommodating because he’s forgetting what it’s like to be in charge, what it’s like to be the alpha. They grab a quick bite to eat and get a rental car, and then they’re driving north on I-93.

At about eleven PM, they pull off and get a room at a tiny little motel. Derek pays and gets them inside and Stiles is yawning and stretching and exclaiming over small things and falls asleep midsentence. Derek takes his shoes off and covers him with a blanket. He watches Stiles sleep and realizes, in that moment, that he doesn’t expect this to work. That he’s convinced himself that it will all day, but it isn’t going to. It’s the last idea they have, and it’s not going to work, and what’s worse is that they’ll have to waste an entire day traveling back.

He sits up all night, watching Stiles sleep.

When he first starts to stir, around eight AM, Derek thinks about waking him but decides against it. He can’t bring himself to. He just wants to sit there and pretend that it might work as long as possible. Pretend that when Stiles wake up, he’ll be the Stiles that Derek is used to. That’s all it is, pretending, but he needs it. Just for another few minutes.

Then the sun shifts and gets in Stiles’ eyes. He rolls around for a minute, then sits up and blinks slowly at Derek. “Whoa, where – where the hell are we?” he asks, and Derek almost can’t speak through the tightness in his throat.

“Maine,” he says, “and you’ve forgotten again.”

“Again? Wait, what?” Stiles looks around.

Derek forces himself to take a deep breath. To go back to the beginning and explain. Stiles listens with wide eyes.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Derek finally asks.

“Uh . . .” Stiles casts back in his memory. “Talking about introducing Isaac into the pack.”

“Jesus,” Derek mutters. He’s lost another five months. Five entire months. He lets out a breath. “We need to get back to Beacon Hills.”

“Yeah, sure,” Stiles says. “I need to call my dad, okay? He still isn’t very steady on his feet – ”

Derek closes his eyes and feels a vicious headache coming on. “Your dad is fine, Stiles. He finished his rehab three years ago. It’s 2015, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, shit. Really?” Stiles shakes his head and looks at his phone. “Yeah, really, I guess. Wow, this is weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” Derek says flatly. “Weird. I need to – I’m going to go use the – ” He breaks the sentence off and goes into the bathroom. He stands there for a few minutes, fists clenching on the counter, listening to Stiles in the other room.

“Hey, Dad? Are you okay? Yeah, yeah, I just – you know I’ve gotta check in with you. And I guess it’s 2015 but it still feels to me like you were just in the accident and I – yeah, I’m okay. Derek? He seems fine, why? . . . no, we’re heading back. I’ll see you tonight. Love-you-bye!”

Derek leans his head against the mirror and reminds himself that this isn’t Stiles’ fault. He shouldn’t be angry at the now-teenager. Stiles doesn’t remember what they are to each other, and he has no way of knowing how upset Derek is. He takes several more deep breaths, clenches and relaxes his fists, and then leaves the bathroom. “Okay, let’s get moving.”

“Okay. So how’d it go with Isaac? Were we right, did it work out?” Stiles asks, all boyish enthusiasm as Derek grabs his backpack.

“Yeah,” Derek says. He doesn’t elaborate.

“Still not much of a talker, I get it,” Stiles says, and Derek feels like he’s been punched in the gut again because he _is_ more of a talker now. Because it’s so much easier to talk to the pack, to Stiles, about small things as well as big things. But he can’t talk to this young version of Stiles, this Stiles who somehow isn’t _his_ Stiles. He doesn’t know what to say. And Stiles is still rambling on, not at all bothered by Derek’s silence, having completely forgotten all the years in between, all the different ways Derek has learned to trust him.

They drive back to Boston and get back on a plane, and Stiles is doing that thing he does where he’s suggesting all the things they’ve already tried, and Derek is trying not to lose his temper.

“Look, I know you’re upset,” Stiles says, “but we’ll get it worked out somehow, you know?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, because that’s better than talking about how Stiles has _no idea_ how upset he is, no _comprehension_ of how upset he is, and that isn’t his fault either. “Yeah, okay. Let’s keep brainstorming.” Maybe younger Stiles will think of something that older Stiles didn’t. Stranger things have happened.

But they don’t. They don’t come up with a single God damned thing the entire plane ride.

“Probably better if I sleep at home tonight,” Stiles says. “I’ll be less confused in the morning that way. You said I was writing myself notes, right? That’s a good idea. I’ll do that again. How much do you think I’ll lose tonight?”

Derek clears his throat. “Probably six or seven months.”

Stiles nods. “Okay, so that’d put me back in . . . August or earlier, wow. Okay. Well, at least I can tell myself not to bother worrying about lacrosse try-outs . . .”

They have dinner with the pack. It’s hellishly awkward. Stiles-at-sixteen doesn’t even _know_ some of these people. He’s only ever exchanged half a dozen words with Isaac or Boyd, and never met Mac at all. He doesn’t like Danny because he still thinks of Danny as Jackson’s jock BFF. Erica makes the mistake of smiling at him and he spends half of dinner gaping at her, like he’s trying to figure out how a girl so hot would be interested in him.

The pack is going to be on their own for a bit, Derek thinks. They’re rapidly approaching the point where they’re going to have to stop and ask whether or not it’s worth it to even _try_ to explain about werewolves and alphas to Stiles, because he’s not going to remember anymore. Maybe they can pass it off as a medical issue while they work on things without his assistance.

When dinner is finally over and everyone departs, Stiles sits down and writes himself the letter. Derek waits in his bedroom while he takes a shower, and he sits on the bed and tries not to flinch when Stiles comes in and turns out the light. The younger man crawls underneath the blankets next to him, and it’s quiet for a few minutes.

“Derek?” Stiles’ voice is quiet and frightened in the dark, and for the first time that day, Derek feels like the reality of the situation is really sinking in for him. “I’m not going to remember you when I wake up tomorrow, am I.”

Derek squeezes his hand and takes a few moments to steady his voice when he replies. “Probably not, no.”

Stiles curls up around his hand, hugging Derek’s arm into his chest. “I don’t want to forget you.”

Derek has to stop and take a breath. “Even if you forget me, I’ll always be here with you. Lupa never changes. No matter what happens. We’re going to get this fixed, Stiles. I promise.”

“Okay.” Stiles closes his eyes and clutches at Derek tighter. But his grip starts to weaken almost immediately as he slides into sleep.

Derek lies there and stares at the ceiling, terrified of what the next day will bring.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this fic really picks up speed fast!

 

In his general morning flailing and half-awake state, Stiles nearly misses the bright green envelope sitting on his nightstand. It’s a good thing he does find it, he later thinks, because otherwise he would have figured out something was very weird when he went to get dressed and saw the scars on his stomach and chest. But he does see it, and picks it up with a frown.

‘Hi Stiles, this is Stiles. You’ve been having some trouble with your memory, so I’m leaving notes for you (us) so you’re less confused in the morning. You’re going to realize pretty soon that a lot’s changed since the last thing you remember, which is probably something about the summer before our sophomore year of high school. So let’s take it in order.

_What’s the date?_ Today is May 25th, 2015.

_No way. 2015?_ Yeah, sorry. A lot has happened. You’ve forgotten about three, almost four years of time. You just finished your freshman year of college and your life is actually kind of awesome. Good on you (us).

_Why am I losing my memory?_ We’re not sure yet. They’ve done a bunch of medical tests, but so far nobody has been able to figure it out. Some kind of magic is involved.

_Ha ha, magic, good joke._ No, dude, I’m totally serious. Now is a good time for you to get up and look in the mirror. Don’t freak out.’

Frowning, Stiles climbs out of bed and heads into the bathroom. He stares at himself in the mirror, dressed in only his boxers and hardly able to believe what he’s seeing. In addition to the extra height, the longer hair, and the wiry muscles, he looks at the scars like they’re something from a movie. He gropes for the letter and starts reading again.

‘ _What the hell!_ I know. Like I said, don’t freak out. A lot’s happened in the past few years. Werewolves are real, magic is a thing, you probably don’t want to think about it too hard. There’s someone downstairs who can give you the details.

_Who’s that?_ His name is Derek. He’s your height, dark, and broody. You’re going to go downstairs and find him looking like someone just killed his puppy. He’s sort of your boyfriend.

_Boyfriend? I’m straight._ Well, mostly, but that isn’t the point. You two are a couple but you don’t have sex. Trust me, you’re going to fall in love with him without ever realizing it. Anyway, it’s also sort of a werewolf thing, he’s your mate, stop rolling your eyes at me. If you don’t want to think of him as your boyfriend, think of him as your brother. And take it easy on him, because he’s more freaked out about this than you are. See, every morning when you wake up, you’re facing this problem for the first time. But he’s faced it every morning for about two weeks now, and every morning you’re forgetting a little more. Now you’ve forgotten about him, and he obviously doesn’t want to admit it but he’s totally not okay.

_So what do I do?_ Go downstairs, hug Derek, make him some breakfast. There are really smart, really competent people who are trying to figure this out. Cooperate with them. Your dad is in on this, listen to what he says, do what he tells you. You can trust Derek one hundred percent. You’re going to handle this, and then they’ll fix it and you’ll remember everything.’

Stiles folds up the letter and takes a deep breath. He studies himself in the mirror and says, “Okay. You can handle this. You’ve obviously handled a lot . . . worse.” He runs his fingers along the scars on his stomach, and Jesus, is that a scar from a _bullet_ wound he has on his upper abdomen? He shudders and throws on some clothes.

The letter’s description of Derek is one hundred percent accurate. There’s a dark-haired man with circles under his eyes and a generous amount of stubble sitting in a chair at the bottom of the stairs, obviously waiting for him to appear. Stiles is glad that Derek was smart enough not to wait in the bedroom, because if he’d woken up to that, he would have been screaming for his dad.

Derek is staring at him with this intense, piercing gaze which makes Stiles’ throat a little dry. He clutches the bright green envelope and says, “So . . . I guess you’re Derek.”

“Yeah.” His voice is surprisingly soft.

“Did you, um, did you read this?” Stiles asks, brandishing the envelope, and he shakes his head. “Okay. Uh. So. I’m Stiles. Shit, you knew that.” He rubs a hand over his head. “This is weird. But uh, I wrote myself a letter saying to trust you and to make you breakfast.”

“You did?” Derek’s lips twitch in a smile. “That’s so like you.”

“Yeah, I guess some things don’t change.” Stiles heads into the kitchen. Derek has already started the coffee maker, and he makes a beeline for it. “French toast?”

“Sure,” Derek says. He takes his own chair back to the kitchen table, watching Stiles with that dark stare. Stiles busies himself with eggs and milk and bread. He finds cooking soothing; he always has.

“Where’s my dad at?” he asks.

“He got up early. Had a meeting with Chris Argent.”

“Who’s that?”

“Oh – he’s a, um. A werewolf hunter. But a good guy. Mostly.” Derek’s tone is a little grudging. “Never mind. Let me start over. Chris is Scott’s girlfriend’s dad.”

“Scott has a girlfriend? Awesome! Hey, where is Scott?”

“At the same meeting.” Derek is still just watching him. “Scott’s in the pack. Our pack. He’s a werewolf; so am I. You’re not, but you’re still part of the pack. So is Allison, Scott’s girlfriend. Her dad has a lot of experience, and he’s trying to help figure out who might have done this.”

“Okay.” Stiles rubs a hand up and down his arm. “Can I call him?”

“Scott? Sure, if you want.” Derek considers this, then lets out a breath. “We decided – he’s helping coordinate things with the pack and the people who are trying to figure out what’s happening to you. And we decided that I would stay with you. Or I guess we didn’t so much decide as I just – did that. Would it be easier for you – if it was him? Here in the mornings, to explain things?”

Stiles is quiet while he flips the French toast. He doesn’t know this man in his kitchen, but there’s this small part of him that _feels_ like he does, that can hear the anxiety in his voice. He can see the way his shoulders are tensing, the way he’s preparing for a blow. “No, it’s fine if it’s you,” he says, and sees Derek’s shoulders loosen. “I guess – we’re – I mean, the letter said to trust you, so I’ll assume I know what I’m talking about. Or that I did when I wrote the letter. Do you like your eggs scrambled or fried?”

“Fried. Hard. And thanks.”

“No problem, man,” Stiles says, cracking some eggs into another pan. “So my job is to sit around and wait while people try to figure this out, and your job is to keep me from freaking out when I wake up in the morning and see that I look like a piñata?”

The slightest hint of a smile twitches on Derek’s lips. “Basically, yeah.”

“Is there something I can do to help at all? I mean, I don’t know anything about magic, but, I could try.”

“You’ve been helping. I mean, up until yesterday you at least remembered the pack and stuff. Don’t worry about it. They’re on a new tactic now, which is to think about all the different people we’ve pissed off and track them down to see if they’re the guilty party. Which you can’t really help with, since you don’t remember pissing them off.”

“Truth,” Stiles says. “Was it fun?”

Derek’s lips twitch again. “Usually.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Definitely.”

“Awesome.” Stiles scoops two fried eggs and two pieces of French toast onto each plate, then drops them both on the table. “Okay, I know that you probably expect me to ask a bunch of questions about werewolves and stuff, but honestly I just don’t want to think about that too much, so can I ask a different bunch of questions?”

“Feel free,” Derek says.

“Did I _ever_ manage to make the lacrosse team?”

“Yeah.” Derek smiles again at Stiles’ incredulous look. “Your junior year. Scott did, too. He was co-captain.”

“Holy shit, yes, awesome,” Stiles says. “Did I – okay, this is kind of insensitive since you’re my boyfriend, but I’ve gotta know – did I ever get a date with Lydia Martin?”

“No,” Derek says, “but she is your friend now, and you seem pretty okay with that.”

Stiles thinks about this, then says, “Eh, I’ll take it. So I’m in college now? Where am I going?”

“San Jose State.”

“Aww, really? I wanted to go to Columbia.”

“Sorry,” Derek says. “Too much else was going on. You decided that you didn’t want to go to such a high-stress school.”

Stiles makes a face. “Okay, fine. How’s my Jeep?”

“You and that Jeep.” Derek shakes his head fondly. “Your Jeep is fine. It’s been modified to have a better engine and painted in camo colors.”

“Sweeeeeet,” Stiles says. He shovels more eggs into his face. He’s quiet while he eats. Finally, he says, “I guess I’m probably going to have to ask you all this again tomorrow. Sorry. Will you answer them all again for me?”

“Every morning for the rest of my life, if I need to,” Derek says quietly.

Stiles looks up, realizes he’s blushing, and then looks back down. “You know, the letter I wrote myself, I said that I fell in love with you without realizing it, and now I can totally see why.” He sees Derek’s cheeks color, too. “Uh, it also said to hug you, which I really want to do right about now, so, yeah.” He pushes his plate aside and gets up, moving around the table to settle himself in Derek’s lap. Derek makes a little noise and pushes his nose into the crook of Stiles’ shoulder, inhaling his scent, which is, okay, weird. But not bad-weird. Stiles wraps an arm around him and hugs him. “It’s gonna be okay, Derek,” he says. “Even if I don’t remember you, you seem pretty cool, so I’m sure we can – you know. We’ll work it out.”

Derek nods and holds him tighter. “Thanks.”

“What for?”

“For always knowing what I need.”

Stiles shrugs a little. “Just doing what the letter said.”

“Well, you wrote the letter.”

“I guess I did!” Stiles laughs. “I need more coffee. Then let’s go check in on Scott and my dad. Deal?”

Derek nods. “Deal.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Sheriff Stilinski waits until Stiles has been reunited with Scott, and Scott is introducing him to Allison and Chris and telling him about the leads that they’d been running down that morning, to pull Derek aside. “How’d it go this morning?” he asks, hoping that he doesn’t look as anxious as he feels. He had wanted to be there, the first morning that Stiles woke up without any memory of the pack, but an armed robbery at four AM had gotten him out of the house.

“Pretty well, all things considered,” Derek says. “He was confused, obviously, but having the letter from himself helped. I guess he told himself in the letter to trust me, so, he didn’t freak out about me being there. I actually asked if he’d rather have Scott there in the mornings and he said no.”

“Well. That’s good.” Tom hooks his thumbs on his belt loops and huffs out a sigh. “Yeah, that’s good. I just wish we knew how long it would last.”

Derek nods. Neither of them say what they’re thinking, that it’s not just Stiles’ memory to worry about, but his emotional maturity.

Still, Derek seems more relaxed than he had been for the previous few days. Tom supposes that the pressure is off now, in a strange sort of way. Derek had been fighting against a deadline, the day that Stiles forgot about him. Now the deadline is past. And while the situation will continue to get worse, for Derek, the worst thing has already happened, and he survived it.

Tom guesses that his calm is only a momentary lull in the emotional storm, but he’ll take it, if it’s all he can get. “Well, if he’s okay with you, that’s good. But if he’s okay with Scott, that might be good, too. Because we’ve been contemplating a road trip, and I thought you might want to come.”

Derek turns to him with a frown. “What?”

“Chris has asked a lot of questions and called in a lot of favors, and we might have finally hit on something helpful. We’ve pretty much ruled out the Gutierrez family – they don’t have the resources – but while all this was going on, Victoria went up to Wyoming. That’s where she’s from originally. She went just to check in and snoop around a bit.”

“I’m surprised she did that,” Derek says, blinking.

Tom gives a little shrug. Victoria Argent is a strange woman, and he’s never been entirely sure of how she’ll react to _anything_. But she seems to genuinely love her husband and daughter, and she did what Chris asked of her. “Well, she says that they have a guest right now. Agnes St. James. She used to be one of the Elders.”

“Oh, God, that bitch,” Derek says. “Well, she’s got more than enough reason to hate Stiles. She never did believe that Ian was acting on his own.”

“Yeah. And I think it’s pretty coincidental that she’s up with the Nazario family, who also have a pretty decent reason not to like you guys, given when happened to Vivien.” Tom raises a hand when he sees Derek start to scowl. “You know and I know that Stiles was barely involved in that and certainly wasn’t directly responsible for Vivien’s death. But given his overall reputation, it’d be easy enough for them to place blame at his door.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Derek says. “What about the sorcerer, though?”

“Well, Chris says that most hunters have at least one or two sorcerers that they consult with, and the Nazario family has several. And, to make things even more likely, Deaton isn’t acquainted with any of them. They’re very clannish and secretive up there, and they have strong Native American roots. He says the kind of magic they can do is very unlike anything he’s ever learned, and he has no real idea of how powerful any of them are.”

“Okay,” Derek says. “So what’s the plan?”

“Chris and Deaton were going to go check it out. I wasn’t sure if you’d want to go or not.”

Derek’s jaw sets, and he’s clearly torn on the issue. Tom can sympathize. While he himself has the desire to go find the asshole who’s doing this and make them regret it, he knows that Derek doesn’t want to leave Stiles. It’s not only instinct, but the fear that if he isn’t around to remind Stiles of who he is ever day, he’ll somehow lose his connection with him.

“No,” he finally says. “I’d rather stay here with Stiles. Is Allison going?”

Tom nods. “Yeah, she said she would go, so I’m thinking she might take Scott or Lydia with her. Or both.”

“Yeah. That – that’s a good idea. What about you?”

“I don’t really have any excuse to go along, and I’ve got my duties here, so I’ll be staying.” Tom folds his arms over his chest and considers. “How much longer do you want to try to explain things to Stiles in the morning?”

“Jesus, I don’t – I don’t know.” Derek pushes a hand back through his hair. “If we could just pass it off as some medical issue, I would, but if he looks in the mirror and sees the scars and everything, he’ll know that’s bullshit, he’ll want answers. And I just don’t know what we would tell him. I know it seems complicated to try to explain ‘werewolves’ to him every morning, but I just don’t see a better alternative.”

“Okay,” Tom says. “I was kind of thinking the same thing.” He checks his watch. “Chris was headed out on a four PM flight, so let’s go check in with him, see if there’s anything he needs.”

They nod and head back to the others. Deaton is sitting with Stiles, patiently explaining what they know about the spell so far. He glances up and gives Derek a nod of acknowledgment. “Stiles asked me to run something by you,” he says. “I’m going to be going up to Wyoming with Chris and, if all possible, I’d like to take a lock of Stiles’ hair with me. It might help me locate whoever there is doing magic against him. If anyone there is.”

Stiles looks up at his father and Derek anxiously. “But he said hair can be used against people, and I wasn’t sure that was okay, so I told him to check with you.”

Tom rubs a hand over Stiles’ head and says, “It’s okay with me.”

Derek’s jaw tightens, but he nods. “Anything that will help.”

Deaton takes out a small pair of scissors and snips off a little piece of Stiles’ hair, folding it into a handkerchief and then tucking it into a small wooden box. “All right, shall we be going?” he asks Chris, who nods.

Allison leans over and squeezes Derek’s wrist. “Lydia and I are going to go with him. Scott decided that he’d rather stay here.”

“Okay.” Derek lets out a breath. Tom nods approval as well. He wasn’t sure whether or not Scott would want to go, given the condition that Stiles is in, but he’s definitely glad that Lydia is. Not only is she one of the smartest people he’s ever met, but she’s well-versed in magical lore, not as deeply as Deaton but perhaps more diversely. She also wasn’t at the Conclave, unlike Scott, so people there won’t recognize her.

“We’ll stay in touch,” Allison says, seeing how nervous Derek is. “I’ll check in every hour. Once I’m off the plane, at least.”

“Okay, yeah. Good idea.” They exchange a quick hug. Scott gives her a hug and a kiss, and Stiles seems a little confused by the tension. Without his memories of everything they’ve been through, he has no real comprehension of the kind of danger they might be walking into.

Which is fine by Tom. In fact, he’d prefer to keep Stiles oblivious to that as much as possible. So once he’s back out at the car with his son, Derek, and Scott, he says, “Well, it’s early yet. How do you boys feel about a few rounds of mini-golf?”

“Yeah!” Stiles says, excited, and gives Derek an innocent, happy smile. Derek forces himself to smile back.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

If Scott is on his phone more than usual that evening, nobody pesters him. They’re at the Stilinski house, with a variety of pack members. Derek wants to limit it as much as possible so as not to overwhelm Stiles, but everyone still needs their alpha time, even if the alpha himself doesn’t realize it. So Boyd and Erica are over, and Mac was there for a while but left after dinner because her little brother was in a play.

Scott broods over this, watching Stiles as he plays video games with Boyd. Stiles has always been big about family, and the families of the pack were no exception. He had always wanted to attend Lakeisha’s dance recitals, and Erica’s younger sister’s softball games. Scott has no doubt that if Stiles remembered what he was, he’d be sitting right next to Mac at that play, and probably would have dragged three or four pack members along with him.

He’s worried about the way Stiles is playing the video game, too, as silly as that sounds. He and Stiles always played a _lot_ of video games, and Stiles is an ace at first-person shooter games. Or at least he was two weeks ago. He’s slower now, less skilled. He wasn’t as good at mini-golf as he used to be. It’s not just that he’s losing memory. It’s like his entire life is being rewound.

They’ve all agreed that there’s no point in worrying about whether or not his memories will return if they can stop the spell. It’s a bridge they’ll cross when they get to it.

But now, for the first time, Scott is watching his friend and wondering if he would want them to. This is Stiles at sixteen, before Peter Hale kidnapped him and broke him. This is Stiles before he committed murder, before he learned how deep his capacity for darkness could run.

It’s not that Stiles is unhappy in their current life. But Scott can’t help but wonder, if he had been given the choice to going back to being innocent and unburdened, what Stiles would choose. He looks happy as he loses at video games and scolds his father about his cholesterol and watches Derek like he’s an interesting puzzle to try to solve.

But Scott can’t exactly ask anyone about that without probably getting punched in the face, so he keeps his observations to himself. In the end, it’s probably a moot point. He doubts they’ll get any choice in the matter. So he sits and watches and continuously texts Allison. Their plane has arrived in Cheyenne. Her mother is picking them up. It’ll be about ninety minutes by car. Then they’re at the house. She meets her great-uncle and there’s nearly bloodshed right off the bat because at least three different Nazario family members don’t want Allison there and suspect that Lydia is probably a werewolf. Chris gets them calmed down. Ariah, the family matriarch, isn’t there, and nobody else seems to want to throw them out without her permission.

Deaton’s magic spell doesn’t get any direct hits with Stiles’ lock of hair, but there are a number of condensations of magical energy nearby, and they’re going to go check them out. She’ll keep in touch. They might not get an answer any time soon.

By the time she’s sent that text, it’s late, and the others are thinking about going to bed. Boyd and Erica decide to head home. Awkwardness ensues between Derek and Stiles, and Scott feels bad for Derek because he can see how hard it’s been for him to watch a movie with Stiles _without_ Stiles sprawled all over him. He keeps reaching out to touch him and then thinking better of the idea.

“I guess I can use the same letter I used this morning,” Stiles finally says. “I mean, it’s got all the basic info in it, and it won’t really matter that tomorrow’s going to be May twenty-sixth, not May twenty-fifth.”

“Yeah,” Derek says.

Scott sees him brooding and makes an executive decision. “Well, since we don’t know exactly what’s going on, we’ll stay up in your room with you. We can shift so it’ll be less weird. And then clear out before you wake up in the morning.”

Derek nods and looks relieved. Stiles agrees readily enough, and they troop upstairs. Of course, Stiles is mentally sixteen at this point, and he wants to read comics and eat chips in bed and he makes a few dirty jokes and wiggles his eyebrows a lot. Derek grumps around and shifts so he doesn’t have to respond, and Scott finally talks Stiles into getting some sleep.

He and Derek agree to take turns staying up, both so they can be available if Allison needs anything, and so they can make sure they vacate before Stiles wakes up. The sensible thing to do would be to leave Stiles’ room as soon as he falls asleep, but Scott has a feeling that Derek might freak out if he suggests that. It would be a quiet, internal freak-out accompanied by agreement, but it would still be a freak-out.

So instead he sits up and plays games on his phone and reads a book and waits. Allison texts twice, first to say that they checked out one of the magical disturbances and it wasn’t relevant, and then to say she’s going to sleep and might not text for a while. Stiles fell asleep around eleven, so Scott wakes Derek at three AM to take over. Then he crawls into the bed and is unconscious within minutes.

Derek wakes him at seven and says, “You have a few messages,” before curling back up at Stiles’ feet. Scott grabs the phone eagerly and sees why Derek had just said that instead of telling him what they were. Having to say them out loud would have been embarrassing, since Allison has texted with, ‘I miss you’ and ‘it’s hard to sleep without you here’.

He texts her to let her know that he’s up for the day, then turns his attention to Stiles. He’s still sound asleep, but it’s been about eight hours, so it’s time to go. He prods Derek up and off the bed, and gets a snarl for his trouble.

Once they get downstairs, Derek is his usual surly self, but he starts the coffee maker because obviously Stiles is going to want coffee when he gets up. Scott finds himself nervous, too. He usually hasn’t been here in the mornings; they haven’t wanted Stiles to feel overwhelmed so they’ve left it to Derek to explain. This will be the first time that he’ll get to be a direct witness to Stiles when he wakes up since this all started.

He’s somehow not surprised when Stiles jogs downstairs and does a double take. “Dude! You’re so buff! What the hell!”

Scott laughs despite himself. “Yeah, I guess I put on some muscles.”

Stiles reaches out and squeezes Scott’s bicep. “Holy God. How much can you bench?”

“Uh.” Scott rubs a hand over the back of his head. “I’m not sure. Five, six hundred pounds maybe?” he says, understating the case dramatically because he doesn’t want Stiles to freak out.

“That’s completely awesome. I mean, the letter said some time had gone by, and God knows that I don’t look anything like I remember, but I – hey, is that coffee? Sweet.” He breaks away from Scott and heads into the kitchen. Everything else takes a second seat while he gets some caffeine. “So, uh . . . I guess you’re Derek. The boyfriend.”

“That would be me,” Derek says, and Scott can see the tension in his shoulders and jaw.

“Damn,” Stiles says, giving a low whistle. “I mean, just, damn. I know I’m basically straight, but I can see myself making an exception for you. Though the letter said we don’t have sex? Which, uh, why? I mean, okay, you could probably have sex with anyone you wanted so I can see why you wouldn’t pick me, but I’m not really sure that’s – ”

Since Derek’s shoulders are just tightening more and Stiles obviously has no idea of the land mine he’s stepping on, Scott hastens to intervene. “Hey, why don’t we make some breakfast and then we can wake your dad.”

Fortunately, Stiles at this age is easy to redirect. “Oh, yeah, good idea. Have we got any of that turkey bacon?”

“We outlawed it. Like, years ago.”

“Fair enough. Stuff was gross.” Stiles is cheerful as he roots around in the refrigerator. Scott shakes his head a little and looks over to see if Derek would welcome a friendly shoulder squeeze, but the older werewolf is gone. Scott assumes he’s snuck away to regain his composure, and elects not to bother him. Instead, he texts the others to let them know that Stiles is up for the day.

“So what’s the last thing you remember?” he asks.

Stiles rubs a hand over the back of his head. “Uh, that Halloween party at Lydia’s where I spent the entire evening getting shot down by every girl in our class.”

“Oh, yikes,” Scott says, but grimaces inwardly. That was another ten months gone in one night.

Stiles huffs a laugh of agreement. “If only they knew what a hottie I was going to turn into!” he says excitedly. “If only _I_ had known.”

“Truth,” Scott agrees.

They make some scrambled eggs and Stiles throws some leftovers in so they’re not so boring, and by then Sheriff Stilinski is downstairs. Derek still isn’t back, so Scott leaves Stiles bonding with his father and goes to look for him. He nearly runs face first into him as he’s coming in from the back yard, holding his cell phone in one hand and with a grim expression on his face. “We’ve got a problem,” he says.

“What?” Scott asks, immediately thinking of Allison and panicking.

“I just got off the phone with Danny,” Derek says. “Jackson’s missing.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so, so sorry about how many OCs this series has, LOL. But not sorry about this one. She's my new favorite. =D

 

In the long run, Derek is glad that he had gone outside so he could get a few minutes to calm down. He knows that Stiles didn’t mean to hurt him, didn’t mean to offend him. But Stiles was normally so sensitive of his feelings around the whole Kate thing, it’s jarring to have him step all over it without realizing it.

So he’s outside, taking some deep breaths of the morning air, when his phone rings. It’s early for anyone to call, but a lot is going on, so he glances at the screen and then answers. “What is it?”

“Hey, look, this might be nothing,” Danny says, “but Jackson’s mom just called me wanting to know if he had spent the night at my place. He didn’t go home last night.”

Derek frowns. “I take it that he didn’t spend the night with you.”

“No, I haven’t seen him in a few days. I tried to call and text him, but he didn’t answer. That was about ten minutes ago, and what with everything going on, I figured I had better call you.”

“Yeah. Why don’t you head on over? Stiles is up for the day. We’ll figure out what to do.”

“Okay,” Danny says. “Should I pick anyone up on the way?”

Derek rubs a hand over his face, thinks about who has and hasn’t gotten alpha time lately. “No. Let’s keep it as small as possible, just to keep things from getting complicated. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” He hangs up and heads inside, nearly running into Scott. “We’ve got a problem,” he says.

Scott blinks at him. “What?”

“I just got off the phone with Danny. Jackson’s missing.”

“Missing?” Scott’s voice rises. “Missing how?”

“Didn’t go home last night, parents haven’t seen him, not answering his phone.” Derek is walking in as he talks. He wants to talk to – well, he _wants_ to talk to Stiles, to _his_ Stiles, but that’s not going to be happening, so he wants to talk to Sheriff Stilinski. He greets the man with a nod and says, “Jackson’s missing.”

“For how long?” Tom asks.

“I’m not sure. His parents called Danny wanting to know if he had spent the night, but I don’t know the last time or place they saw him, and I don’t know how to ask them without arousing suspicion.”

Tom grimaces. “Well, they know Danny is close with Stiles, they could mention it – ” Before he can finish his sentence, his phone rings. He glances at the screen and says, “Or, that could happen.” He picks it up and says, “Sheriff Stilinski,” and then puts it on speaker.

The voice on the other end is Mike Whittemore. “Tom, I’m sorry to bother you at home but Deputy Carmichael told me that you probably wouldn’t be in until this afternoon, and I’m sure he’s competent but I would rather bring this directly to you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tom says. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, it – it’s probably nothing, but – Jackson didn’t come home last night. I’ve tried to call him and I’ve been texting him for the last hour but he hasn’t responded, and he’s normally glued to that cell phone. I called Danny but he hasn’t seen him and he tried texting him, too, so he isn’t just avoiding me. I tried down at the clinic but it isn’t open, there’s a sign up about a family emergency and that it’s going to be closed until Friday.”

“Hm,” Tom says, careful to stay noncommittal. “Okay. When was the last time you saw him?”

“He had dinner here yesterday and then he said he was going out to a movie with some friends,” Mike says. “It was a late show, ten o’clock-ish, so I didn’t really worry when he wasn’t home by the time I went to bed. But when I got up this morning, his bed hasn’t been slept in, and his car isn’t here.”

“Do you know what friends he was going to the movie with?”

“He didn’t say. If it wasn’t Danny, I presume it was some of his other high school friends. I know some names but I don’t have their phone numbers.”

“Okay, well, let’s start there,” Tom says. “And I can put an APB out on the car, see if we can hunt it down.”

“Thanks.” Mike sounds relieved. “I know that technically we can’t file a missing persons report so soon, but, well . . . with Jackson’s history, I just thought . . .”

“It’s fine. We can at least do some preliminary work.” Tom gets a pad of paper and starts jotting down some notes.

Derek leans over as something occurs to him. “What about his dog?”

“I – oh! Wilma?” Mike says. “Yes, she was with him last night. You know him, he takes that dog everywhere he goes.”

“Well, that’s pretty noticeable, a guy with a three-legged dog,” Tom says. “I’m sure someone’s seen him. Let me make some calls and I can see what I can find out.”

Mike thanks him again, and Tom hangs up. It takes less than five minutes to ascertain that Jackson had gone to a movie at 10:15 with a few friends and his dog, then left afterwards by himself. After that, he had vanished into thin air. Tom calls down to the station and has Carmichael put out an APB for both the car and for Jackson and Wilma.

By then, Danny is there, and Scott has updated him, and Stiles is still sitting there, confused. “Jackson?” he asks. “Tell me that he and I aren’t pals or anything.”

“No, you two still pretty much disdain each other’s company,” Scott says. “But he’s a sorcerer.”

Stiles whoops with laughter, then sees the faces around him. “Oh. That wasn’t a joke.”

“Trust me, I was just as surprised as you were,” Danny says dryly. “But yeah. He kind of got out of hand and started magicking a bunch of shit he really shouldn’t have touched, it . . . it’s a long story. But if he’s missing now, it has to be connected somehow.”

“I can think of one really obvious way it could be connected,” Derek says. “If he was the one doing it.”

Danny recoils from this suggestion. “What? No. He wouldn’t.”

Derek pushes a hand through his hair. He’s never understood Danny’s attachment to Jackson, and he doesn’t want to waste time arguing with him. “Let’s at least consider it as a possibility.”

“I’m not sure he can,” Scott says. “Deaton bound his magic.”

“Yeah, but that whole ‘calling on a dark spirit to increase your power’ thing could get him around that, couldn’t it?” Tom says. He isn’t a huge fan of Jackson either; he’s never _quite_ forgiven Jackson for nearly killing Stiles by cutting the brake lines on his Jeep. When nobody knows the answer, he says, “Well, I can ask Alan. I’d better call him and let him know that Jackson is missing, anyway.”

Danny frowns as Tom leaves the room. “He wouldn’t,” he reiterates.

“Look, Danny,” Derek says. “Jackson’s never liked Stiles. He’s fallen to dark magic once before. Just because he’s been doing better lately doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.”

“The first year of college was pretty hard for him,” Scott admits reluctantly. “I can see him getting back into it as a way to, you know, reaffirm to himself that he’s special.”

Seeing that Danny was about to start protesting again, Derek says, “Let’s just . . . not rule it out, okay?”

“Okay, fine,” Danny snaps, “but how about we focus on the far more likely possibility that he’s in some sort of trouble?”

“Well, we’ll focus on finding him,” Derek says. “One way or another.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Tom has to leave a message for Dr. Deaton, who he presumes is somewhere in the wilds of Wyoming, courting trouble. While waiting to hear back, he leaves Derek and Scott with Stiles, as protection, but takes Danny with him. The teenager is obviously antsy, and it’ll be helpful to have his nose along.

Surveillance footage shows Jackson coming out of the movie theater, waving to his friends, and heading into the parking lot. Traffic cams catch him exiting the movie theater complex and then making the turn onto one of Beacon Hills’ main thoroughfares. It looks like he might be heading home, but after he turns off the main road, there are no more cameras.

“So somewhere after his turn from Beacon Street onto Broad Street, but obviously before he got home, he vanished.” Tom’s face creases as he studies the footage. “That’s less than ten minutes of road, so let’s drive it and see what we can find.”

“Okay,” Danny says. “Maybe I’ll smell something.”

Danny has a good nose, one of the best in the pack, but Tom is struck with the sudden image of him hanging out the side window as he drives, and he has to force down a smile. There’s nothing funny about the situation, but still. He imagines that Stiles would still want him to be able to laugh, even when things are bad.

They drive back and forth the route once but find nothing. Tom decides to branch off onto the side streets, thinking that Jackson might have taken a different route. Danny wants to jog around on his own, since his senses are dulled in the car.

On his third pass, Tom’s driving past a small church and he spots Jackson’s car parked in the middle of the lot. He pulls over and calls Danny to let him know where he is. The younger man shows up bare minutes later. “Yeah, that’s definitely his car,” he says with a nod at the license plate. He takes a few, cautious sniffs. “I can smell him here, but . . . there really isn’t much of a trail.”

Tom watches while Danny ventures out a little, taking those small, quick breaths, pulling in the scent. When he comes up with nothing, Tom says, “Someone must have picked him up. The question is, why did he pull over?”

“Maybe he had car trouble,” Danny suggests.

“Yeah.” Tom takes out his phone and calls Mike Whittemore, who picks up eager for news. “Hey, Mike. We found Jackson’s car a few blocks away from your house. Do you have a spare key? We’d like to see if he pulled over because he was having trouble.”

Fortunately, he does, and he says he’ll be right there. He knows the church in question, drives past it every day, and he’s there three minutes later. When he unlocks the car, he blanches. “His phone,” he says, pointing to where it’s been tossed into the passenger’s seat.

“Well, that explains why he didn’t respond to our texts,” Tom says, frowning.

“Why would he leave his phone?” Mike asks.

“Not sure. Here, hand me the keys.” Tom doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is that if this is a crime scene, he doesn’t want anyone touching anything. The car starts fine, so he turns it back off and carefully picks up Jackson’s phone.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Mike says, pacing fretfully. “He might’ve decided to just walk home, but then why would he leave his phone? He lives on that phone.”

Tom takes a deep breath and makes a command decision. He knows that Stiles wouldn’t like it – and that Jackson will like it even less – but Jackson’s parents need to know what’s going. There’s just too much danger to hide it from them. He knows that Jackson has kept it from them out of fear of their rejection, but he’s a father first and foremost, and he knows how frustrating it is to be left in the dark. “I think,” he says slowly, “that we’d better sit down and talk about this.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

When Allison had been a child, it had sometimes struck her as odd how removed her nuclear family was from her extended family. The only relative she saw on a regular basis was Kate, which was apparently only because she could fake being normal with ease. She had barely seen either of her sets of grandparents. As far as she knew, her mother was an only child, and she hadn’t even known Victoria had a cousin of about the same age until Vivien had showed up at their house.

Now she’s in the very uncomfortable position of meeting Vivien’s mother. Vanessa Nazario stares down the bridge of her nose at Allison. She’s tall, broad-shouldered, and similar in facial structure to her deceased daughter, although her hair is cropped short, once dark but now heavily salted with gray. Her face is weathered and wrinkled from years in the sun, but it makes her appear timeless, not old.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asks, voice brusque.

“There are some odd things happening in Beacon Hills,” Chris says, his voice carefully respectful. “We heard that you have excellent magic users, and thought we might get their advice.”

Vanessa stares hard at him. “Why should I help you?”

“Because we’re hunters. We help each other. That’s what we do.”

“Fair enough. This way.” Vanessa jerks her head towards the hallway, and Allison and Chris follow her. Victoria chose not to be present for this; she doesn’t get along with her aunt, she says, and her being there won’t help. Deaton is likewise letting the Argents handle this, hunter to hunter, and he’s working on some magic spells with Lydia’s assistance.

Vanessa heads into the kitchen of the old house, which is huge and drafty and creaky under foot. She puts a kettle on the stove and busies herself with mugs and tins of tea. “What’s been happening?”

“People have been losing their memories. We suspect a sorcerer is involved, but haven’t been able to find one. Our Druid is very good, but we’re at a dead end.”

Vanessa gives a snort. “Yeah, well, he won’t get along with my guys. They hate interlopers. They won’t even let me watch what they do. Effective as shit, though. Still, if you want to give it a try, you’re welcome to ‘em.”

Allison looks a little surprised by that. It isn’t at all the response she had expected. Vanessa isn’t _friendly_ by any means, but she isn’t hostile. The brisk attitude could easily be mistaken as such, but she’s starting to get the impression that that’s just the way this woman is. There’s been no mention of the pack, no mention of the boy in red or any of the Chris’ supposed betrayals, no mention of Vivien.

“Will they come here, or will we need to travel to them?” Chris asks. His voice is a little cautious, like he’s just as wary of Vanessa’s attitude.

“Oh, they won’t let you within fifty yards of their digs,” Vanessa says with a snort. “I’ll give ‘em a call. Probably won’t get here for a few hours.” She picks up her phone – from the wall, not a cell phone – and dials. She speaks in a language that Allison doesn’t know for several minutes, then hangs up just as the kettle starts to whistle. “Try this shit,” she says, pouring the water into mugs. “It’s this natural stuff one of them makes me. Supposed to improve your alertness and acuity on long hunts or after late nights.”

“Thanks,” Allison says, accepting a mug.

“You heard at all about the Conclave next year?” Vanessa asks, and Allison is again taken aback because this woman is being almost _friendly_. “Where they’re going to host it?”

“Mikael was talking about taking volunteers and then drawing lots,” Chris says. “So it won’t be sprung on anybody.”

“Mm. Sounds good. Ariah was talking about hosting. God knows we’ve got the room.”

“Ariah?” Allison asks, trying to be polite.

“My sister. Your other aunt. Not Vicky’s mother – there were three of us sisters, and Vera died years ago. Ariah is the oldest, and nominally in charge of the family.” Vanessa’s eyeroll speaks clearly of what she thinks of this. “She lives about twenty miles from here. Anyway, I’ll tell her to call Mikael, if he’s the one setting all of that up.”

Allison recognizes the name now. Ariah Nazario is who they were talking to when they were trying to set up an inspection of the Nazario prison camp – and the one who had refused. She wonders if she’s remembering the family tree wrong, and if Vivien was Ariah’s daughter, not Vanessa’s.

She’s startled from her train of thought when a woman walks in. She’s elderly and stooped, with white hair cropped surprisingly short. She stops the instant she sees them, eyes narrowed, and hisses, “You!”

“Us,” Allison says, blowing on the top of her tea to cool it.

“How dare you! Get out!”

“Lord, Agnes, don’t get your panties in a twist,” Vanessa says. “Want some tea?”

Agnes St. James, former elder of the hunter council, turns and glowers at Vanessa. “What are they doing here?”

“They wanted a consult with one of my shamans. It’s not a big deal. Don’t make it one.”

“They murdered your daughter!” Agnes spits out, and Allison thinks that apparently she wasn’t wrong about Vivien’s parentage after all.

Vanessa gives her a look and then rakes her hand back through her hair. “Guess we hadn’t addressed that yet. Okay.” She turns back to Chris. “I should have said this as soon as you got here. Thanks for taking care of Kali for me. Would’ve sucked to have to go all the way to California to kill her myself.”

Chris eyes her, still wary, but nods and says, “No problem.”

“That’s it?” Agnes spits. “That’s all you have to say?”

“Look,” Vanessa says. “As the person in this room who undoubtedly has the most right to be upset about Vivien’s death, I’m going to say this once and once only: shut the fuck up, you old bag.”

Agnes’ mouth drops open. “You – you – I was _never_ treated this way when you people still had respect for your elders – ”

“Yeah, I know. It’s all you can talk about.” Vanessa shakes her head as Agnes swats the mug of tea out of her hand, making it shatter on the floor, and then storms out. “Jesus Christ, that woman. She was driving Ariah nuts so big sis sent her to stay with me, and if she doesn’t learn to mind her manners I’m going to shave her head myself, since that seems to take the wind out of her sails.”

Allison is gaping as much as Agnes was. Nothing up here is anything like what she had expected.

Vanessa turns back to Chris. “I know you warned Viv about the way things were in Beacon Hills, and I know she didn’t listen to you. She had that – way – about her. Always thinking she knew best.” Her movements go a little jerky as she cleans up the remnants of the tea, but when she rises, she’s composed. “Anyway, even if Joe and the others hadn’t gotten arrested, Jesus, she was working with Kali, who she knew was psychotic, to try to get inside info. She should’ve known it would get her killed. I loved my daughter, but she got in over her head and she got killed. It happens in our world. No hard feelings.”

“I appreciate that,” Chris says. He takes a sip of the tea and tries not to grimace.

Vanessa barks out a laugh. “Awful stuff, isn’t it? I never said it tasted good. Anyway, I figure you probably know a thing or two about headstrong daughters.”

“That I do,” Chris says somewhat wistfully, reaching over and giving Allison’s shoulder a squeeze.

“At least mine never joined a werewolf pack,” Vanessa says, with a snort. “Jesus, the amount of shit you’re going to have to eat over that. I don’t see why everyone makes such a big fucking deal about it. I mean, as far as I can see, it’s a great way of making sure the werewolves on your territory toe the line. And if they cross that line, well, shit, you’ve got someone on the inside ready to go.”

“Most of the controversy starts with the part where I’m allowing werewolves to live on my territory at all,” Chris says dryly.

“Yeah, but that’s because the people arguing with you are stupid,” Vanessa says. “Maybe we look at it differently because there’s always been born wolves living up here. Unfiltered wilderness, that’s what we’ve got here. Those assholes down in Arizona, Drake and Stoddard on the east coast – they don’t get it because they think they can honestly keep the werewolves out. But you can’t, especially not out here. There are wolf families that those assholes don’t even _know_ about living on their territory, who’ve never made trouble and never got caught.” She shakes her head. “Maybe it’s a guy thing.”

“Don’t say that in front of Mikael,” Chris says.

Vanessa barks out a short laugh. “Yeah, I like Aronsson.” She nods towards Allison. “You know how most of the hunter families or cooperatives are run by women, right?” she asks, and Allison nods. “You Argents just suffered a severe shortage of double x chromosomes in your current generation. But you’re the next up. Stella’s up north, Ariah here, Agnes in Texas, Angela Peretti, Hannah Winchester, Betty Arnelle – ‘til she was killed anyway – et cetera, et cetera. Then aside from the Argents, you’ve got three groups run by men. Drake, okay, he’s a newbie and he’s not into the whole hunter philosophy of women being in charge, whatever. Then there’s Jim Stoddard, and he’s a misogynist pig. Which is what you’d expect from a guy who suddenly decided that women couldn’t be in charge. So you’d expect Mikael to be a misogynist pig too, right? But he isn’t. His top two lieutenants are women, and if you so much as imply that they’re not capable, he will make popcorn and sit back while they kick the shit out of you.” She lets out a sigh. “God, that guy could get it.”

Allison lets out a burst of laughter that she quickly stifles. “We should visit here all the time!” she whispers to her father, who gives her an amused look.

Chris is about to say something else, but then Deaton walks in. He gives Vanessa a polite smile and says, “Chris, we have a problem. Can we speak privately?”

“Sure.” Chris gets up and follows Deaton back to their rooms, with Allison on his heels. “What’s happening?”

“Jackson’s gone missing,” Deaton says, and Allison startles. “I got a message from Tom. They’re worried that he might be the one responsible for what’s happening.”

“Is that possible?” Allison asks, blinking. “You bound his magic.”

“There are ways around it,” Deaton says. “Someone whose magic has been bound can always find another mage who can unbind it.” He shakes his head and says, “I’m far more worried that our mysterious adversary has abducted him, although I can’t fathom a reason why. How are we doing up here?”

“Vanessa is going to call her contact with the sorcerers she’s using so we can ask them some questions, but . . . my gut says very strongly she’s not involved. That doesn’t mean they’re not – Vanessa’s strong and she’s got clout, but it’s Ariah that runs the show up here. Still, I think if an initial round of questions doesn’t get us anywhere, it’s unlikely.”

“Okay. Then once we’ve asked them some questions, we can head back.”

“Shame,” Allison says thoughtfully. “I was just starting to like it here.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Danny gives Sheriff Stilinski a surprised look, obviously sensing that he plans to give the Whittemores the whole story, but he doesn’t protest. He does, however, say, “I’m gonna call and check in with Derek.”

That doesn’t surprise Tom. It’s hard enough for the betas with Stiles semi-out-of-commission. Something big like this, and Danny will need reassurance from someone above him in the pack hierarchy. Of course, Tom’s statement has only made Mike more worried, and it takes a few minutes to get everyone organized enough to get back to the Whittemore house.

“Did you find him?” Connie Whittemore asks anxiously, coming out of the kitchen as she hears them come in. Her face falls when she sees them. “Oh. Hello, Sheriff. Danny!” she adds, and pulls him into an embrace.

Tom gets them both sitting down. “So, you know how sometimes strange things happen in Beacon Hills that we can’t quite explain?” he asks, and Mike gives him a skeptical look. Tom sighs and throws in the towel. “Yeah, that’s because there’s a werewolf pack living here.”

Mike opens his mouth to laugh, protest, or outright call Tom crazy, but Danny chops that off at the knees by shifting. Connie yelps and lurches backwards, nearly falling off the sofa, while Mike swears up a veritable storm that would have made Erica proud. It takes several long minutes to calm them down. Jackson’s mother actually faints when Danny tries to help her up, and she remains somewhat wobbly once roused.

“This is insane,” Mike says. “I’m going insane. My son is missing and I, I’m having some sort of psychotic break – ”

“Mike,” Tom says firmly, “I would love to sit here and hold your hand and help you work through this, but we really don’t have time right now. Can you please just focus on the issue at hand, and if you want to believe you’re only going along with this because you’re crazy, fine.”

Connie looks up and says, her voice trembling, “Where’s our son?”

Tom takes a deep breath. “We don’t know. I don’t believe he’s in any immediate danger.” He’s not going to say it out loud in front of Danny and certainly not in front of the Whittemores, but he finds Derek’s theory more likely than Danny’s. He can’t fathom a reason why whoever is messing with Stiles would want to kidnap Jackson. Then again, even if Jackson is the perpetrator, he can’t imagine why he up and vanished. No matter how he slices it, Jackson’s disappearance doesn’t make sense.

Either way, if whoever was behind this wanted Jackson dead, they probably would have found his body in the parking lot. It doesn’t give them a lot of time, but they at least have something to work with. “You guys deserve a full explanation and I’m going to see that you get one,” he continues, “but we’re kind of in a time crunch right now so I’m going to give you the highlights. Jackson is a sorcerer.”

“He . . . he can do magic?” Mike asks incredulously.

“Yeah. When he was first learning, he got a little out of hand, which is what was going on his junior year. But he’s beyond all that now.” Tom doesn’t want to dwell on the past. “But because of other things that have been happening, we have reason to believe that there’s a powerful sorcerer in town right now, and for some reason, he or she seems to have abducted Jackson.”

“Why?” Connie asks blankly.

“To be honest? I don’t know. Maybe to try to get his help with some spell, maybe to try to frame him for the other stuff that’s been going on. I have a lot of questions without answers right now. I want to try to piece together what happened last night. He obviously pulled over for a reason. My best guess is that he thought something was wrong with the car.”

“From what I know about magic,” Danny says, “it’d be pretty easy to toss a hex onto a car. They’re delicate. They could have messed with his phone, too.”

“Hell, you could do that with an EMP,” Mike says, recovering somewhat. “You wouldn’t even need magic.”

“But the question is, why did he get out of his car?” Danny asks. “I mean, he knows that weird stuff is going on. He’s not a fucking idiot. Even if his phone wasn’t working, he would’ve stayed in the car. It’s not like they set it on fire or anything.”

“He has a protection spell, right?” Tom asks.

Danny nods. “Yeah, Stiles got him one back during the whole mess with Stone. He takes it pretty seriously, too.”

Mike and Connie look lost. “What does that mean?” Mike asks.

“It means that someone can’t do magic that would directly affect him,” Danny explains. “Like, nobody could cast a spell on him that would force him to get out of the car.”

“No, but we’ve met at least one witch who can do pretty convincing illusions,” Tom says thoughtfully. “Maybe he thought help had arrived.”

“What about Wilma?” Connie asks. “Why – why would they take his dog?”

“Actually that’s pretty simple to explain,” Danny says. “Wilma is his familiar – you know that term?” he asks, and Mike nods reluctantly, like he’d rather say no. “So she can find him if they get separated. If they let Wilma go, she’d come find one of us, and she could lead us right to him.”

“I hope they take care of her,” Connie chokes out. “He really loves that dog.”

Or, Tom is thinking, Jackson could have left his car and his phone to make it seem like he had been abducted, and then taken his dog somewhere hidden and safe so he could keep doing magic. But the question was, why? And how? Jackson had been working with Deaton; Tom is very sure that Deaton would have _noticed_ if he was suddenly capable of doing magic again.

“Do you mind if we take a look at Jackson’s things?” he finally asks.

“Oh, of course,” Connie says, standing up. Tom follows her up the stairs with Danny on his heels. The room looks like a normal teenager’s room, or at least a normal teenager with a lot of money. A flat-screen TV, a huge bed, an enormous rack of DVDs and games. There’s a desk tucked into the corner with two drawers, both of which are filled with the same kind of random things he finds on Stiles’ desk: a spare phone charger, a pack of highlighters, a bag of chips.

“What’s in here?” he asks, kneeling beside a trunk at the end of Jackson’s bed.

“Oh, his lacrosse things, I think,” Connie says.

Tom doubts that a chest full of lacrosse uniforms would be locked. He tugs at it with a grimace, then gestures to Danny. The younger man grabs the lid and, with a grunt of effort, pries it open. Connie makes a small noise of protest, but doesn’t actively argue. There is indeed a layer of lacrosse shirts on top. Tom lifts them out to reveal a lot more. There are books, candles, little packs of feathers, some little vials of liquid, a set of brass scales.

“Oh my God,” Connie says, sinking down on the edge of the bed.

Tom doesn’t say anything, but he wonders, if Jackson’s not supposed to be doing magic on his own, what’s all this stuff doing here? He carefully catalogues the belongings. There’s nothing that seems particularly worrisome. The vials are labeled with little tags that have innocuous things listed like ‘honey’ or ‘lake water’ so unless it’s a code, there’s no problem there.

The books are a little more interesting. Books of spells or herbal remedies, books that are just full of alchemical diagrams, books about mythology and symbolism. There’s one blank book, which he figures will be a journal, but it’s just more drawings and symbols. The handwriting changes halfway through.

“Excuse me a moment,” Tom says, and calls Deaton. This time he gets him. “Jackson has a trunk full of magical paraphernalia in his room,” he says.

“That’s not unusual,” Deaton says. “He _was_ doing some small magic on his own, with the limited powers he still had at his disposal, and he often helped me with research. If you tell me what’s there, I can tell you if there’s anything out of the order.”

Tom nods and lists it all off. Deaton is silent until he mentions the book with two different sets of handwriting. “That’s odd,” he says. “Is any of the handwriting Jackson’s?”

Tom shows the book to Danny, who nods. “Yeah, the second half is by him.”

Deaton’s voice takes on strangely cautious tone. “Is there – anything written on the inside cover, by chance?”

“Let me check.” Tom flips back to the beginning. “Oh, yeah. It’s – I guess it’s a poem. ‘Hide your thoughts away, keep your secrets unspoken, desires will come true’. What does that mean?”

“It’s a haiku,” Deaton says. “That book used to belong to Sebastian Stone.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drama! Tension! Excitement!

 

“Okay, wait a second, first things first,” Tom says. “Is that a big deal? That he still has this?”

“Well, I didn’t know he had it, which is somewhat worrisome,” Deaton says, his voice calm. “I can see why he would have kept it in the beginning, thinking that he might need it someday. And he might still have it to use as a sort of totem, a focus to help himself stay on the wagon, so to speak. But it sounds like he’s been writing in it.”

“Yeah. I can’t really read any of this stuff,” Tom admits. “I guess it looks like spells. I thought that Stone didn’t really use them?”

“He would often convert them,” Deaton says. “Take the symbols or ceremonies other people used, grasp the meaning of them, and then . . . just do them on his own, without whatever others needed. I suppose Jackson might be doing the same thing. Forming a collection of sorts, in anticipation of the day he’ll have his magic back.”

“But you had no idea he was doing this,” Tom says.

“No. He never mentioned it to me.” Deaton sighs. “He probably figured I would make him stop.”

Tom grimaces. “Okay. Look, this whole idea of summoning a . . . summoning a greater power,” he amends, not wanting to talk about demons in front of Jackson’s parents. “Is that something that you can do after your powers have been stripped or bound?”

“That’s a complicated question,” Deaton says, and Tom rolls his eyes despite himself. “Most of the time, no. But someone else can summon the being for you, and then you can make the deal. Jackson himself has enough limited use of his powers, under my supervision, that yes, he could probably do it on his own. These creatures can be . . . eager to cross over. If they get even the slightest bit of help, they can make it the rest of the way on their own.”

“Great,” Tom says. “Wouldn’t you have known?”

“He could have hidden it from me. If he had that sort of help.” Deaton sounds weary. “I don’t think he would, though. He was doing well. Really well. Two years ago, I would have believed it of him, but not now.”

“Okay.” Tom lets out a breath. “Okay. If – do you know anywhere he might have gone? If he was using magic again?”

“No, unfortunately. I’m sorry.”

“All right. I need to go. I’ll keep in touch.”

“We’ll probably be back tomorrow,” Deaton says.

Tom says goodbye and hangs up. He looks at the anxious people who are clearly all waiting for him to produce a miracle. “Danny, can you tell if Jackson has been using the stuff in that box or not?”

Danny grimaces a little and says. “Yeah. Scent is concentrated in the hands, and – he’s been handling it, definitely. I can smell some of the herbs that Deaton uses and sulfur from matches for the candles, too. But that doesn’t mean he’s been doing magic,” he adds hastily. “I mean, not the sort of magic that you’re talking about.”

“I know.” Tom squeezes Danny’s shoulder. “Okay. I want to sit down and talk with Derek and – ” He stops to wonder if Stiles is mature enough, _old_ enough, to handle this. “And Stiles, hopefully. Why don’t you call some of the other wolves and search the area. There are those woods less than a block away, so he might have headed there. We won’t find him if we don’t look. But be careful. There’s still a very strong possibility that he was taken against his will.”

Danny nods, clearly relieved to have something productive to be done. Mike, who clearly doesn’t know how to handle this, says he’s going to check in at some other places he can think of that Jackson might go if he’s upset. Connie will stay home in case Jackson shows up.

With this attended to, Tom heads back home. Derek and Stiles are playing video games in the living room. Stiles bounces to his feet when he sees his father with a boyish grin. “Hey, Dad! What’d you find out?”

Derek looks up as well, then turns the game off and gets to his feet as Tom comes into the room. “I’ve updated him on everything that happened with Jackson,” he says.

Tom nods in thanks and gives them a rundown of everything he found out. Derek listens with a faint frown while Stiles rocks back and forth on his heels. While he’s talking, Tom goes into the kitchen and gets some coffee, both for himself and for Stiles. “So that’s where we are now,” he says. “I don’t want to say anything in front of Danny, and to be fair I think there’s still definitely a possibility that Jackson was abducted, but it doesn’t look good for him. Deaton’s confirmed that he could have gotten his powers back _and_ hidden it from him.”

“We still don’t know how he would have done anything to Stiles,” Derek says.

“That’s true. But he’d have an easier time getting something he could use than some sorcerer in Wyoming.”

“True,” Derek says, scowling.

“What about Stone?” Stiles asks. “What happened to him?”

Tom glances at Derek, who grimaces, and he isn’t surprised that Derek skimmed over the details of Stone’s final moments. “He’s dead. And yes, I’m sure. I saw the body.”

“Does that matter with sorcerers?” Stiles asks. “Derek said his uncle came back from the dead.”

“Only for a few days,” Derek says. “And I’m pretty sure the spell he used only worked because he was a werewolf. But . . .” He sucks in a breath. “What if he’s inside Jackson’s head, somehow? Like the way Peter got stuck in Stiles’ brain? Maybe Jackson tried to summon him and that’s what happened.”

“I really don’t think he would,” Tom says. “He might be eager to get his magic back, but I don’t think he’d want to be Stone’s lapdog again.”

“Well, what if someone else did it?” Derek says.

“Deaton said that what happened to Stiles and Peter was so rare that nobody’s ever really studied it,” Tom says. “Do you really think it could happen twice? In the space of six months?”

Derek shrugs. “This _is_ Beacon Hills.”

“Fair enough,” Tom says dryly. He has to admit that the idea has some merit. Hell, if anyone had figured out what had happened to Stiles and Peter, maybe they had even duplicated the effect on purpose. That would explain why Jackson had been practicing magic again, why he had left of his own volition. Or it could have something to do with the book itself. He’s read Harry Potter, he knows how that could work. He makes a mental note to have Deaton run a dispelling charm on the book as soon as he gets back into town. “Jesus, though. This is all wild speculation and we have absolutely nothing to back it up.”

“Why are you guys so convinced he did it?” Stiles asks. “Scott and Danny both seemed to think he must have been abducted.”

“That’s because they’re the super sunshine squad,” Derek says dryly. He sighs and says, “Jackson did . . . bad things. When he was using.”

“But he’s been clean for years, right?” Stiles says. “I mean, if we’re going to use the drug analogy.”

“Yeah, but the problem with that analogy is that addicts can, and do, relapse after years of sobriety. Usually due to stress. Jackson’s been at his first year of college, he’s under a lot of pressure. Maybe it didn’t go as well as he hoped. Maybe he just wanted to do something that he felt like he was good at, that made him special, and maybe it got away from him.” Tom scrubs a hand through his hair. “He’s innocent until proven guilty, and we’re not going to prove anything if we can’t _find_ him. So I guess that’s what we’ll focus on.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

While they’re waiting for Vanessa’s contacts with the local sorcerers to show up, they check out some consolidations of magical energy that Deaton was able to locate. Wyoming is an interesting place, with so much open land, and most of what they find seem to be outdoor gathering places where magic was probably worked in the recent past.

When they get back to the house, Ariah has showed up. She’s taller than her younger sister and forged from steel. She gives Chris a cold glare, just as she had when she had greeted them the night before, and then says, “Let’s get this over with.”

Deaton gives her a friendly smile and then sits down with the man she waves into the room, who has darkly tanned, weathered skin, and introduces himself as Vincent. Deaton smiles and shakes his hand.

He explains the spell in detail while Vincent listens, and talks about the different things that they’ve tried to block the magic. The others simply listen. Allison sees that Lydia’s eyes are half-closed, and guesses that she’s listening to the heartbeats of the people in the room, waiting to see if anyone gets excited or upset at anything they say.

“You have been very thorough,” Vincent says, nodding quietly. “I will make a mixture for you. Said to dispel magic from within.”

Deaton clears his throat. “I’ll need to see the recipe. To see if there are any . . . components that could be harmful.”

“I am not allowed to tell you the quantities or the procedure,” Vincent says, “but I will give you the list of ingredients.”

“That would be excellent, thank you,” Deaton says. Vincent nods and says that it will take him about an hour to brew, and then he’ll be back.

Ariah is watching them with a narrow-eyed gaze. “This is for a werewolf,” she says flatly, as soon as Vincent has left. “That’s why you want the ingredients. To make sure it doesn’t have mistletoe.”

“Mistletoe is a common base for such potions,” Deaton says, “but it can be harmful to supernatural creatures, true.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t worry about that,” Ariah says, “because we don’t _make_ purifying spells for supernatural creatures.”

Deaton doesn’t bat an eyelash. “You may not, but I do.”

Ariah’s face tightens into a scowl. “I’ve allowed you onto my territory,” she says. “I’ve given you access to the shamans. But I’m not going to let you walk out of here and give that potion to an enemy.”

“It’s not for an enemy,” Allison says loudly. “It’s for an ally.”

“By whose definition?” Ariah asks.

“Mine,” Chris says. “If the shaman refuses to provide the potion, that’s one thing. But since he’s willing to provide it, we’re going to accept it. And that’s how it’s going to be.”

“You know, you may think that you’re important after the Conclave,” Ariah says, sneering at him, “but I’ve stepped on men twice your age and wiped them off my boot. By the rules that were established, you’re my _equal_. Nothing more.”

“Which is why I treated you as an equal,” Chris says coldly. “I asked permission to come onto your territory. You granted it. I asked your sister to set up a meeting with the local shaman. She did it. If you didn’t want us to get help, then you should’ve showed us the door when we got here. I’m not asking you to like the way I do things, and I’m not here to tell you what to do with the werewolves on your territory. But if one hunter asks another for help, granting it is common courtesy.”

“So if I came down to your territory to ask your local sorcerer to brew me up some potion to kill a werewolf, would you let me walk away with it?” Ariah challenges.

“If he was willing to make it for you, yes. Because I trust his judgment.”

Ariah continues to glare at him. “Things aren’t going to be like this forever, Argent. The landscape is changing. And there are more of us than there are of you.” She gets up and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind her. A few moments later, they hear her pick-up truck cough to life.

“Is that true, do you think?” Lydia asks. “How do things currently stand?”

Chris shakes his head. “When we decided after the last Conclave that each family would get a representative, that left us with a Council of twelve. I’ve got Julien and Mikael on my side. But my cousin Henry, along with Ariah and Stella Jones – they’re against us and everything we stand for. The Gutierrez family has been ostracized. Lucy Arnelle would side with us if she could, but she’s got no standing; she’s too young and her territory has been all but decimated in the last few years. Martin Drake is a slimeball and nobody _wants_ him on their side, and nobody quite dares go talk to anyone at the Order of St. James to see what they think. Hannah Winchester and Angela Peretti down in Florida have both proclaimed that they’re too busy managing their territory to give a shit about what the rest of us do with ours. And Jim Stoddard has just been entirely too reasonable about everything, which makes me think that if it came down to it, he’ll side against us.”

“So, what you’re saying is that we’re screwed,” Lydia says.

Vanessa barks out a laugh. “No way. You guys say the word and you’ll have eighty werewolf packs and every vampire, incubus, troll, et cetera, on your side. If it comes to open war, we’ll get massacred. And that’s exactly why it hasn’t come to open war yet. Because you guys don’t want it, and your opponents can’t risk it.”

Allison grimaces. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this here.”

“Probably not,” Vanessa says, and shrugs. “I don’t care. I haven’t won a fight with Ariah since I was seven years old and she stole my tricycle. I think we should stay out of this. Watch our territory, keep our noses clean. But Ariah, she’s too proud. She doesn’t care that Vivien’s dead – she just can’t stand that our precious reputation got tarnished.”

Chris leans on the table, pushing a hand through his hair. “Vanessa, what about that prison you guys have?”

“What about it?” Vanessa asks.

“You know what about it. Ariah won’t let us see it. Is it as bad as the one that the Gutierrez family runs?”

“Probably,” Vanessa says. “Though it isn’t as bad as Stoddard’s.”

Chris frowns. “No, we went to see that one. Julien said it checked out.”

“Give me a break! Jim Stoddard took a bunch of recently captured werewolves, scared the living Christ out of them so they’d toe the line, and stuck them in a temporary building somewhere and made it all look legit. You think you saw Stoddard’s prison? No way.”

Allison’s jaw tightens and she exchanges a look with her father. Chris shakes his head and says, “Jesus, Vanessa, if they knew you were telling us this – ”

“What, they’ll come kill me? I welcome them to try.” Vanessa quaffs the last inch of her beer. “I haven’t lived this long by being weak. And I’m sick of a bunch of assholes doing whatever the fuck they want because nobody’s got the balls to tell it like it is.”

“So is this your way of saying you’d have our backs, if it came down to that?” Chris asks.

“The only back I’ve got is my own,” Vanessa says. “But call me if it comes down to a fight. I enjoy a good fight now and then, and after all, nobody lives forever. Might as well find something worth dying for.” She stands up, pushes her chair in, and leaves the room in the same direction that Ariah did.

“Shit,” Chris says.

Lydia nods. “That does seem to sum it up.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It’s a long, boring, frustrating day. They search the entirety of Jackson’s neighborhood twice, they check the clinic, the preserve, the hospital, the mall. Everywhere that they can think of that Jackson might go, they check, but he’s gone. It’s like he disappeared off the face of the planet.

Stiles starts yawning at about ten o’clock and Derek tries not to think about how _early_ that is, how Stiles rarely goes to bed before midnight now. He doesn’t argue, though, just watches as the teenager thumps up the stairs to go to bed. He’s fifteen in his mind now. How young is he going to be when he wakes up? Thirteen, twelve? Even younger? The amount of time lost is accelerating every night.

He tries not to think of the way Stiles looks at him now, like he’s vaguely confused about Derek’s existence in his life, like he can’t imagine the two of them together. The way Stiles only turns to speak to him as an afterthought now, the way Stiles keeps accidentally stepping on his feelings without realizing it, when before he was the only person Derek trusted his feelings with.

He tries not to think about how quickly Stiles is regressing, and what’s going to happen when he hits zero. Can that happen? Can he just forget everything, be a newborn infant in a twenty-year-old’s body? Will he go into some sort of coma, will he die? He tries not to think about the fact that they’re running out of time.

He tries not to think about the fact that even if they can figure out what’s happening and how to stop it, there’s no guarantee that Stiles will recover any of his memories. He dreads having to try to explain everything to him, trying to teach him how to be their alpha if he’s only twelve years old, having to explain to him that he’s killed people. He tries not to think about Stiles never being _Stiles_ again, because even if they stop this and they start moving forward from this point on, so much of him has been lost.

He doesn’t want to think about any of that, so he distracts himself. “What are you thinking?” he asks the sheriff, who’s just come into the kitchen with a weary expression and started making himself some tea.

“Honestly, I don’t know _what_ to think,” Tom says. “You want some tea?”

“Yeah. Uh, chamomile if there’s still any.” That might calm him down enough to sleep, although he doubts it. He knows how Stiles feels now, how he just can’t sleep, no matter how tired he gets, because he’s so terrified of the way time is passing, the way Stiles is slipping through his fingers.

Tom nods and starts rooting around in a cabinet. “None of it makes any sense, regardless of which way you slice it. Let’s say that Jackson is into black magic and he’s the one doing this to Stiles. Okay. But why would he suddenly run off? It’s not like we were onto him. We had no idea he might be responsible. Maybe he needs to do the next part of his spell at his super-secret hideout. Okay. But why disappear? Why not tell his folks that he was going camping with some friends?”

“Jackson doesn’t camp,” Derek says dryly.

Tom brushes this aside. “You see my point. It would have been easy for him to just take off for a few days without anyone being suspicious. So why do something that would draw everyone’s attention, why fake an abduction? It doesn’t make any sense. So let’s take the other angle. He was taken against his will. I can understand the ‘how’, but again, I’m stuck on the ‘why’. Whoever’s doing this seems to have a grudge against Stiles. Why involve Jackson? It seems like such a random thing to do. Was he involved? Did he know something?”

Derek’s quiet for a minute. “Look, Tom – you’re a good cop. The best I know. Just – what’s your gut instinct?”

“My gut instinct . . .” Tom trails off, thinking about this for a long moment. “Is that this is a feint. A distraction. That whoever’s behind this knows that Jackson’s disappearance will keep us busy, keep us from focusing on the real problem, figuring out who’s doing this and how to stop them. Or they could be trying to frame him. Make us think that he was the one behind this, and that he ran off, so we’ll be looking for Jackson and not them.” The kettle starts to whistle, and he pours the water out, still thinking. “What’s in that chest isn’t conclusive evidence that Jackson was dabbling in black magic again. Just that he was thinking about it. We can have Deaton look it over in more detail when he gets back tomorrow, but I don’t know how much good it’ll do us.”

“The problem is that if this whole thing with Jackson is just a ruse, then . . .” Derek’s voice colors with frustration. He’s losing his temper despite himself. “Then we’re no closer to the answer than we were before, and . . . we can’t keep going like this. We have to, to do something. I don’t fucking care about Jackson, but this has to help somehow, whether it’s a distraction or not, there has to be some clue somewhere!”

“Look, Derek, I get that you’re upset about this,” Tom says, reaching over to squeeze his shoulder. “But you need to – ”

“No, you don’t! You don’t _get_ it,” Derek snarls, shoving him away. “You’re the last one to say you can get this, because Stiles, he’ll _never_ forget you, they could regress him all the way back to an infant but you’ll still be his father, you’ll still be the _one person_ in his life that he’ll always know and instinctively trust. Meanwhile, he doesn’t – he doesn’t know me and he – he’s everything to me, how can you possibly understand what this is like?”

Tom regards him in silence for a minute before he says, “You know what really scares me, Derek?”

“What?” Derek snarls.

“In a few days . . . less than a week, probably . . . Stiles is going to get up in the morning and he’s going to run into my room like he always did when he was a kid, on the weekends . . . and he’s going to ask ‘where’s mom’?”

Derek stops. He feels like he’s been punched in the gut.

“Ever since this started, I’ve been trying to emotionally prepare myself to have to explain that to him all over again,” Tom says. “I remember every minute of it the first time, you know. The way Claudia and I had to sit down with a seven year old and try to explain to him what a ‘terminal illness’ was . . . that his mommy was going to go away and never come back, and she didn’t _want_ to go, but she had to . . . and he’s going to forget that. He’s going to want his mom and I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.”

“Jesus,” Derek mutters. He hadn’t thought of that. How had he not thought of that? But Tom is right; they’re getting dangerously close to that point.

“So no, Derek, I don’t understand what it’s like for you. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the most important person in my life forgets I exist . . . but keep in mind that this is no picnic for me, either. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, raking a hand back through his hair. “Okay.” He shakes his head. “Sorry. What’s our next move?”

“You know . . .” Tom sits down at the table, dunking his tea bag in the water a few times. “I actually just had a thought, while I was trying to tease out what Jackson’s disappearance might mean. Maybe we’re looking at this from the wrong angle.”

“How so?” Derek asks.

“We focused on how it was happening; it got us nowhere. We focused on who was doing it; again, no progress. But maybe . . . maybe we should be thinking about _why_ this is happening.”

“Why?” Derek asks blankly. “Because someone is trying to make us suffer, I presume.”

Tom shakes his head, frowning. “Maybe. But maybe not. A spell like this can’t be easy. And it’s so specific. If you want to take away his memories, why not just do it?”

“Slow torture,” Derek suggests.

“There’d have to be an easier way. It just . . . it feels like there’s something huge were missing here. If we could figure out why, why _this_ spell, what actual purpose is underneath it, maybe that would lead us back to the who and the how.”

Derek reminds himself that as much as Stiles might appreciate his melodrama, it won’t be a help here, and resists snarling at the sheriff. “Well, I’m racking my brain but I’m not coming up with anything. That’s not how I think. This sort of twisty, underhanded thinking with feints and distractions and spells that serve multiple purposes, this – this is Stiles’ specialty, not mine.”

“Same, unfortunately,” Tom says, with a sigh. “He got that from Claudia. Too bad we can’t talk to the dead.”

Derek’s head jerks up. “Wait,” he says, blinking. “Maybe – maybe we _can_.”

“Beg pardon?” Tom says.

“Not – not your wife. Sorry. Really, sorry. But Peter. He’s still there, inside Stiles’ mind, even though I don’t think Stiles himself can talk to him while he’s like this. If we could – get in touch with him somehow – he’s the smartest person I know. And this sort of thing is sort of his specialty.”

“I’ve got no idea how we would do that,” Tom says, somewhat skeptical.

“Me neither. But Deaton will be back tomorrow, maybe he’ll be able to do it. I mean, at least it’s an idea.”

Tom nods wearily. “Fair enough. Now, I’m headed back to the station. Mike Whittemore was going to get me Jackson’s phone records and his financials for the last month, so if anything funny was going on, maybe we’ll be able to find it. You stay here with Stiles, and keep him safe.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, finally some of the funny moments I've been waiting for. XD

 

One of the benefits of military connections and a lot of money is that Chris never has to fly commercial. Most hunters have friends that can charter aircraft for them, if they don’t have their own. Mikael Aronsson, for example, is a licensed pilot and has his own small plane. Chris has learned to fly in case of emergency, but doesn’t exactly have room for an aircraft hanger in Beacon Hills, so when they need to fly, they leave from Fresno but still on a private plane.

That means it’s quiet when Allison moves across the aisle to sit next to her mother, who’s passing the time by knitting a scarf. “Hey, Mom, can I ask you something?”

Victoria offers her daughter a smile. “Of course.”

“So, you said that you don’t get along with your aunt Vanessa, and . . . I guess I’m just kind of surprised. I expected her to be awful, but she was really pretty cool.”

“Mm.” Victoria glances back to her knitting. “It’s a little complicated, and it has to do with how I met your father.”

“Oh, yeah?” Allison says eagerly. She’s long had a suspicion that the story she had been given of her parents’ first meeting was a lie, since she didn’t find out about werewolves and hunters since she was sixteen. Now that she knows that they’re both from hunting families, she expects that there’s more to it than she knows. She waves Lydia over, who slides in the seat next to her, and they both look at Victoria with hopeful expressions.

After a moment, Victoria puts down her knitting. “We met at a Conclave, actually. This would have been about two years before you were born.”

“Was it love at first sight?” Allison asks eagerly.

“He was . . . impressive,” Victoria says, a slight smile touching her lips. “Let’s put it that way. We actually fought during the tournament. He put me in the dirt, I nearly broke his windpipe. It was very . . . exciting. We became fairly well acquainted.”

“ _Very_ well-acquainted,” Chris says with a smirk, settling into the seat next to his wife.

“Dad!” Allison says, giggling. Victoria gives her husband an unimpressed stare. He just smiles back.

“In any case,” she says stiffly, “it was a short fling, that was all. He lived in Illinois at the time; I lived in Utah. So we made the best of the week and then went back to our lives. This was before the internet, you know, before e-mail, so communicating wasn’t as easy as it is now. We decided at the Conclave not to write each other, not to make more of a relationship that we couldn’t easily have.”

“A summer romance,” Lydia says, with a happy sigh.

“Now, the Nazario family seat is out of Casper, where we just were,” Victoria continues, “but my parents and I lived in Cedar City, Utah. We were responsible for that part of the territory. So Aunt Vanessa and I didn’t see each other very often. She was my favorite relative back then, the fun aunt who always encouraged me to follow my dreams, and we got along very well. Then my parents announced that they had arranged a marriage for me. Which, naturally, I fought tooth and claw.”

“As you should,” Allison says with a nod.

“I didn’t want to get married, I didn’t want some man telling me to get back in the kitchen and mind the children,” Victoria says. “I wanted to be a hunter, like Vanessa, and of course I was hearing all about Vivien then, who was about five years older than I was and really starting to make a name for herself. But my parents insisted. Vivien wanted to be in the alpha pack hunters and had refused to get married for that reason. Vanessa has three other children, and Ariah had two as well, and there were enough of us to cover the territory so my family wanted to marry me off to gain a solid alliance with another family.”

“That’s awful,” Lydia says, wrinkling her nose. “But since you ended up with Chris, at least you got away from them.”

“Well,” Victoria says, as Chris leans in to kiss her cheek, “I was still arguing with them while they dragged me to the airport to meet my fiancée, who had flown in with his parents, and lo and behold – there he was.” She smiles up at Chris, a genuinely happy smile. “My knight in shining armor.”

Both girls gasp. “You were her fiancée! And you didn’t even know?” Allison asks.

“I refused to let my parents tell me the name,” Victoria says, looking somewhat amused at her younger self. “I wasn’t going to marry him and his name was unimportant. And Chris didn’t know either, because his parents had only told him about the betrothal at the last minute, afraid that he would argue, too. So we were standing there at the airport, gaping at each other like slack-jawed idiots.”

“Imagine the surprise of all the attending family members when we were suddenly just fine with getting married,” Chris says, smirking. “In fact, we just left them standing there while we went to get reacquainted.”

“Why, Mr. Argent,” Lydia says, pretending to be scandalized.

Allison giggles. “What does this have to do with Great-Aunt Vanessa?” she asks.

“Well, she basically tried to intervene, saying that she knew I didn’t want to get married and trying to save me from the arranged marriage,” Victoria says. “Which I appreciated at first, except she refused to listen to me when I tried to explain to her that I was fine with marrying Chris, that I knew him and loved him. And she became very disappointed in me. She said they ‘got’ to me, and that I was wasting my potential. I think she meant well, but . . . I told her that I was perfectly capable of being both a warrior and a wife. She never married, I think for the same reasons she didn’t want me to get married. In any case, we argued about it a great deal, and said some regrettable things. She refused to come to the wedding, and we didn’t really talk much after that. In fact, other than my mother’s funeral a few years later, this is the first time I’ve seen her since then.”

Allison chews on her lower lip. “That sucks,” she says. “Maybe you should try talking to her. I mean, you’re both older and wiser now. And it seems like she wants to help.”

“I suppose I’ll think about it,” Victoria says.

Chris reaches out and squeezes her hand. “They’re a family full of extremely proud women. I think it’s hard for any of them to apologize or admit that they were wrong. But I think that in her own way, by supporting Allison, Vanessa is trying to make amends. To tell you that you raised an amazing daughter that more than lives up to the family’s expectations.”

Victoria sighs. “I’ll give her a call. I suppose it’s worth it to talk to her if it gains us an ally.”

Chris leans over and gives her a kiss. “Now that’s the Victoria I know and love.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Derek stares up at the ceiling of the Stilinski’s living room, trying not to think too much. He slept on the couch, fitfully at best. At around midnight, he had gotten a text from Scott that read, ‘Allison and the others are on a red-eye back. Should be in around dawn.’ Tom had come home around two AM, saying he had started tracking down a number of leads, his guys were on it, and he wanted to get a few hours of sleep.

Now he’s watching light slowly start to dawn through the windows of the room. He feels blurry and anxious, and after a few minutes, decides to get up and make some coffee. It probably won’t help, but Stiles will want it when he gets up. Or will he? Was he allowed to have coffee when he was twelve? Knowing Stiles, he’d probably been drinking it in infancy.

The thought makes a slight smile touch his lips, but it fades away quickly. He makes the coffee and decides to make a run out to get some donuts. By the time he’s back, the sheriff is up and drinking his first mug. “Well,” he says, after they both consume a donut in silence, “I’m going to go wake Stiles.”

Stiles hadn’t written himself a letter the night before, and since they don’t know exactly how young he’s going to be, having his father wake him seems like the best idea. Derek watches him go up the stairs and wonders how much he’s going to tell him. Will he tell him about werewolves, will he tell him who Derek is? They’ve talked about it, but he knows that it will depend some on how Stiles reacts.

Unable to help himself, he edges towards the stairs and sits down at the bottom of the steps, listening. There’s a grumble and a groan that sounds like Stiles every morning, then Tom says, “Hey, kiddo, good morning.”

“Hey, Dad,” Stiles says, through a yawn. “Did I oversleep?”

“No,” Tom says. “But I needed to talk to you first thing because you’ve been having some trouble with your memory, and I don’t want you to get confused.”

“Memory?” Stiles says, and he already sounds confused. “I know who I am and stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s good, good first step,” Tom says, and Stiles laughs. “But you’ve forgotten a few years. How old are you?”

“Twelve and a quarter! And I’m totally getting a bike for my half birthday. You said I could. The old one is too small for me now.”

Derek closes his eyes. That’s nearly three years in one night.

“Okay,” Tom says. “It’s great that you remember being twelve and a quarter. But you’re actually a little older than that.”

“How old?” Stiles asks, and there’s a moment of hesitation. “Oh, _dude_!” Stiles exclaims, which Derek takes to mean he’s looked in a mirror, or maybe just looked at his hands, which probably look cartoonishly huge. “I grew up _hot_! Holy cow! How many girlfriends do I have?”

“Son,” Tom says patiently. “At the moment you do not have any girlfriends.”

“Aw, man,” Stiles says, almost a whine. “Wait, why don’t I remember? What happened? Did I get hit on the head? Was it a car accident? Oh my God, am I like that guy in Memento? Should I get tattoos everywhere?”

“That movie’s rated R, son, when did you even _see_ – ” Tom makes an obvious effort to wrench his mind back on track. “No. You weren’t hurt, at least not that we know of. Don’t freak out, okay? But we think it’s some magic spell.”

“Oh my God! That is so cool! Really? Like, _really_ really? You’re not joking, right? I know you’re not because you don’t joke about, like, anything, you have zero sense of humor – ”

Tom groans. “Let’s get some coffee and some Adderall in you before we continue this conversation, okay?”

“Sure! Okay!” There’s a creak as Stiles bounds out of bed and then Derek hears the sound of drawers opening and closing, and Stiles getting completely distracted by his wardrobe, then completely distracted by his body, and then completely distracted by –

Derek can’t help what happens next; it comes out in a high-pitched squawk that he won’t admit to later. “Now is _not_ the time for you to jerk off, Stiles!”

“Oh my _God_!” Stiles yelps from upstairs. “Who are you? How did you know all the way down there! Oh my God, what is happening?”

Derek groans and considers crawling under the sofa. When Stiles comes downstairs five minutes later, he’s blushing bright pink and won’t even _look_ at Derek, who Tom introduces as a family friend, probably because Stiles would be even _more_ mortified if he knew that Derek was his boyfriend, even in a nontraditional sense. He does tell Stiles that Derek is a werewolf, and then they have to put up with Stiles begging him to shift and to do werewolfy stuff and asking a million questions about werewolves.

“How the fuck did you keep up with this kid?” Derek asks, already exhausted, and Tom just shakes his head in a combination of fondness and bemused horror.

By the time that’s over with, Stiles has had a mug of coffee and his Adderall has kicked in and he’s markedly less spastic. He’s still asking a lot of questions, but at least they’re generally on topic now. All told, it takes them about an hour before they’ve eaten breakfast and gotten Stiles caffeinated and as many of his questions answered as they can.

Tom has been texting for the last several minutes, and he says, “Okay, Alan’s going to meet us at the clinic. Let’s go.”

“Why don’t I drive the Jeep, in case we split up afterwards,” Derek suggests, and Tom agrees.

“That Jeep is awesome!” Stiles says, admiring the camouflage paint job. “Is it yours?”

“It’s yours, actually,” Tom says.

“Dude! You bought me a car? I have the best life ever when I’m grown up! Even if I don’t have a girlfriend.” Stiles bounces over to the Jeep. “I wanna ride in my Jeep with Derek, can I?”

“Sure,” Tom says, with a sideways glance at Derek, who gives a little nod.

Derek’s worried that the car ride is going to be awkward, but it isn’t, because Stiles hardly ever stops talking. He has hundreds of questions about werewolves, about his Jeep, about his father, about Scott, about magic. Derek can barely answer them before the next one is out of his mouth. “God, Stiles, drink your coffee,” he groans, glad that they brought some in a thermos for him.

Deaton greets them at the clinic, looking somewhat tired. Derek can’t blame him; he can’t imagine how it would be possible to sleep on an airplane. He says that to the best of their ability, the people in Wyoming, Agnes St. James included, had nothing to do with what’s going on. Jackson’s disappearance seems to confirm that. He tells them about the potion that Vincent had made for him.

“Well, let’s try it,” Tom says.

“I’d prefer to try it just before he goes to bed,” Deaton says, “so it’ll be at maximum potency. For all we know, if we give it to him now, it will have worn off by the time the spell activates again.”

Derek sighs. “Fair enough,” he says. “We were wondering if it would be possible to talk to Peter.”

Deaton looks at them blankly. “Why?”

“Well, because . . . whoever’s doing this is clearly an underhanded son-of-a-bitch, so maybe it would help if we talked to someone who’s also an underhanded son-of-a-bitch,” Derek says.

“Fair enough,” Deaton says. “I’m honestly not sure. In theory, at least, it should be possible. Stiles is a medium, a conduit. He can talk to Peter when he’s asleep, but we should also be able to talk to Peter through him. Let me do a little research.” He turns to Stiles and says, smiling, “How would you like to meet the dogs I have in boarding? Since my assistant is out, I’m sure they would appreciate the company.”

“Yeah!” Stiles says, excited. Derek and Tom follow him into the back, where Deaton takes the three dogs he has into a larger pen where they can play with each other. “Hey, so, who’s this Peter guy that you’re talking about?” Stiles asks, wrestling with a Husky.

Tom and Derek exchange a look, and then Derek says, “He’s my uncle. He died a few years ago, but because of a different spell, you wound up being a conduit between him and the afterlife. Sort of.”

“That’s . . . weird,” Stiles says, his forehead wrinkling. “Why?”

“Well, you know how wolf packs have an alpha, right?” Derek says. “Peter was our alpha.” It’s a bit of a stretch, but he wants to keep this as simple as possible. “When he died, he passed his power on to you, because he thought you’d make a really good alpha, too. Which you do, and that’s probably why you’re being targeted right now. But since he shared his power with you, you can talk to him in the afterlife.”

“That’s cool,” Stiles says. “How’d he die? Is that rude? I’m sorry, asking that is probably really rude. But seriously, how?”

“Hunters killed him,” Derek says, since he sure as hell isn’t about to tell the truth.

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” Stiles starts playing fetch with a beagle.

It takes about an hour before Deaton comes out of his workshop in the basement and proclaims that he’s found a spell that he thinks will help. He makes Stiles sit down cross-legged and makes a circle of salt around the two of them. He sets up some white candles in a five pointed star, sits across from Stiles, and says, “Are you ready?”

Stiles has been looking around at the salt and candles and magical paraphernalia with increasing wariness. “This is weird and I don’t like it,” he says, giving Tom an appealing glance. His father manages to appease him, assuring him that he’s going to be fine, he knows it seems strange but everything’s going to be all right. Stiles-at-twelve still trusts his father implicitly, so he doesn’t continue to argue. They put him in the circle and Deaton starts to chant.

Derek isn’t sure what he’s expecting, while Stiles sits there with his eyes closed, but then he gives a little twitch and they open again. They’re not brown anymore, not Stiles’ eyes, but instead they’re a bright, cold blue. Peter’s eyes. Peter/Stiles looks up at Derek and says, smiling, “Hello, nephew.”

After a moment, Derek manages a weak, “hey” in reply to his uncle’s greeting.

“It’s been something of a rough ride in here,” Peter says. “I’ve had the distinct feeling that something is wrong, but whenever I try to talk to Stiles, it’s like shouting at a wall. What, precisely, is happening?”

Derek is going to explain, but he finds that his throat is tight and aching. It’s Deaton who explains; he starts at the beginning, explaining the way the spell has worked, the different things they’ve tried to stop it, and the conclusions they’ve come to based on the results.

Peter sits with his eyes half-lidded, listening intently, and Derek finds that the knot in his throat is actually easing somewhat. Despite his (many) faults, Peter is the smartest person that Derek knows. If _anyone_ can figure out what’s going on, it’s going to be him.

“Tom here,” Deaton finally finishes, gesturing to Sheriff Stilinski, “pointed out that we’ve been focused on _how_ this is happening and have neglected to think about _why_ it’s happening. We came up fairly blank there, however, so Derek recommended we try you, to see if you had any ideas.”

“Since I’m the most underhanded person you know? Derek, I’m flattered,” Peter says, and it’s Peter’s smirk on Stiles’ face, which is strangely comforting. “But yes, you’re right. Figure out the why, and you can figure out the who. And once you have the who, they can explain the how.” He taps his fingers against his mouth. “A question or two. You said he’s losing knowledge as well as memory. Yes?”

Tom nods. “Yeah. And not just of events, but of . . . he can’t speak Spanish anymore. He’s taken Spanish ever since his freshman year of high school; he was basically fluent in it at the start of this. Now he only knows a few words.”

“Interesting. Is he clumsy?”

“What?” Tom asks.

“Has he become clumsier?” Peter repeats patiently. “I know that you’ve all done extensive physical training. I also know that the Stiles I met when he was sixteen was a clumsy, flailing, gawky boy. So, has he become clumsier?”

“Yeah, actually,” Derek says. “I’ve noticed it a lot in the past few days. And – he’s lost other skills, things he should be able to do without thinking about. He doesn’t know how to drive anymore, and he types a lot slower. Some of this stuff should be kinesthetic memory, but it’s gone, too. And he’s _acting_ younger. Less mature. I mean, not that Stiles was ever a font of maturity, but . . .” Derek trails off and sees that Tom is nodding, somewhat wearily.

“Interesting,” Peter says again, with a pensive look on his face. “So this isn’t about memory, not really. The memory is almost a byproduct of the spell itself. Yes . . . this does tell us several specific things about whoever’s behind this. Because the question is, indeed, why _this_. Why this slow . . . regression?”

“Clearly they want to torture us,” Derek says flatly.

“No, nephew,” Peter says. “There are much, much easier ways of doing that. Spells that can inflict pain from a distance are a dime a dozen. He could have simply kidnapped him and left you all frantically looking while he sent you his fingers one at a time. No, I know torture, and this is something else. This has a very specific purpose. Think about it. It’s not enough for this person to kill Stiles or even destroy him. Our foe wants to _erase_ him.”

Derek shudders. “Jesus, I can’t . . .” he says, rubbing a hand over his face, and Tom squeezes his shoulder.

“Why,” Peter murmurs, more to himself to Derek. “Why this . . .”

He’s quiet for a long minute.

“All right,” he finally says. “I’ve discarded a number of theories and settled on the one I believe to be most likely. You’re looking for a hunter, and someone with good reason to have a grudge, those two things are almost certain. Stiles and I have had several long discussions about the way he became the alpha. About the way an alpha can will power to one of their betas, if they’re killed. And that, I believe, is what our enemy is trying to prevent. If they kill Stiles, he can pass the alpha power along to somebody else in the pack, and they’ll just have a new, pissed-off alpha to deal with. But if they _erase_ him . . . degrade him to the point where he no longer realizes he _has_ the power, let alone needs to pass it down . . .” He spreads his hands. “What’s easier? Killing one alpha after another until the entire pack is gone? Or erasing one alpha, and then coming after a batch of scattered, leaderless, traumatized betas?”

“Jesus,” Tom says, raking a hand through his hair. “But then why keep it going? He forgot he had the alpha power three days ago.”

“Two possibilities, of equal likelihood,” Peter says. “One: the spell is automated to a certain degree, that much is evident. It’s possible that it can’t be stopped, or that stopping it would take effort they have no interest in putting forth. Two: better safe than sorry. At this point, Stiles still has enough self, enough spark, that merely telling him ‘you have this’ would result in him subconsciously passing along the power, were he to die. They want to continue to reduce him until even that is not an issue. It’s what I would do, if I were the one in charge.”

“So who could it possibly be?” Derek growls. “We know it’s a hunter who hates us, there are dozens, _hundreds_ of people who fit that fucking criteria. It sure as fuck isn’t _Jackson_.”

Peter gives a snort. “Jackson. Why would you even think that?”

“He’s missing,” Deaton says.

Peter’s head jerks up. “He is? Why didn’t you tell me that at the beginning?”

“We didn’t – we don’t know that it’s relevant,” Tom says, a little startled. “We figured that whoever is doing this kidnapped him as some sort of red herring, to put us on the wrong track.”

“No, absolutely not,” Peter says, shaking his head decisively. “This changes _everything_. Why give you a red herring? Why waste effort and risk exposure by taking Jackson, who does, after all, have at least some limited power in his own right? It’s not as if you were terribly close to discovering who they were; a red herring is completely unnecessary. Someone this clever wouldn’t take a risk like that. If Jackson is missing, I know _exactly_ who is behind this.”

The others wait with baited breath. When Peter looks at them expectantly, Derek growls and says, “For fuck’s sake, you drama queen, who?”

“Lord, you people need me to do everything for you,” Peter says with a sigh. “Think. Why take Jackson? Why risk that? Because this isn’t just targeted at Stiles. It’s targeted at you.” He stabs a finger at Deaton. “Take your apprentice, that you’ve expended so much time and emotion on. Possibly use them to get to you – you must have at least a limited magical bond at this point. This isn’t someone who just hates Stiles. This is someone who hates our dear Druid.”

“If you’re going to suggest Sebastian Stone, he’s extremely dead,” Sheriff Stilinski says. “Although we had talked about the possibility of him coming back, the way you did.”

“That’s highly unlikely. And don’t forget, we’re looking for a hunter, someone who wants to erase Stiles and wipe out his pack. But I’m afraid I don’t know the name of the man in question. If Stiles gave it to me during the story, I’ve forgotten. He’s a hunter and a sorcerer in Oregon. Dr. Deaton, I believe you stripped him of his magic after your encounter.”

“That guy?” Derek is surprised. “Uh, Eli something, I think. He was one of Stella Jones’ men. Yeah, he put the spell on Stiles that worked like a time bomb.”

“Oh, no,” Deaton says, his voice a little subdued. “That’s how he’s been doing this. That’s how he had his hooks in Stiles this entire time. When he took that spell off, he left a little bit of his magic inside Stiles. That gave him an opening that _nothing_ could stop, no protection spell, no counter-spell, nothing.”

“I thought magic being stripped meant you couldn’t do stuff like this,” Tom says, gesturing.

“He made a deal,” Peter says. “Almost certainly. He had someone summon him some demon or otherworldly monster, exchanged a piece of himself in return for the power to get his revenge. It’s simple enough. I do, after all, know all about vengeance.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Derek mutters. “Okay. What now?”

“Find Eli,” Peter says. Derek gives him another expectant look. “Do I have to do _everything_ for you?”

“No.” Tom gets to his feet. “I’ll handle this. Derek, you get my son back to your den and keep him safe. I’m going to call Chris.”

Derek nods. “We should probably wake Stiles before you go,” he says, and Tom agrees. Derek looks back at Peter and says, “Uh. Thanks. I mean . . . thank you. For your help.”

“It was no trouble at all, nephew,” Peter says. “Feel free to call me again. It seems I can’t get through to Stiles while he’s like this, so he won’t be able to update me himself. Find Eli. But be warned – you’re going to have to force him to remove the magic voluntarily, and he’s not going to be eager to cooperate.”

“One thing at a time,” Derek says, and Peter laughs in agreement. Deaton leans forward and blows out the candle at the top point of the star. Stiles’ body jerks a little and then his eyes snap back to being their usual amber.

“That felt _weird_ ,” he says. “Like I could hear him talking but I wasn’t in the room or something like that. Hey, he helped, right? It felt like he helped.”

“Yes, he did.” Tom leans over and tousles Stiles’ hair. “I’m going to leave you with Derek while I go track down some leads, okay? You stick with him, and he’ll take care of you. Do whatever he says. But if you get scared or have questions or just want to talk to me, you call me any time, okay?”

“Okay,” Stiles says, with a nod. Once his father’s left the room, he turns back to Derek and says, “Hey, do you know how to play lacrosse? Or maybe we could go get pizza. Is it too early for pizza? Does Rosati’s still have the lunch buffet? No, if we eat too much we wouldn’t be able to play lacrosse. We could go see a movie. Oh my God! I can get into R-rated movies now without having to sneak in. I could _buy_ an R-rated movie! Let’s go buy an R-rated movie!”

Derek sighs. It’s going to be a long day.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Jackson. How did you grow on me so?

Jackson is pissed off.

That isn’t actually a new state of mind for him. He spends a lot of his time pissed off. Pissed off at slow drivers in the fast lane, pissed off at his know-it-all history professor who’s _clearly_ wrong when he says that there's no continuing impact of white supremacy, pissed off at the guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer from the cute sophomore in his polisci class. Jackson Whittemore hates ninety-nine percent of the people he meets, because they piss him off.

But he really, really hates Eli Whitaker, because not only has the guy abducted him (embarrassing), chained him to a wall in a basement (obnoxious), and taken all his stuff (annoying), he won’t fucking shut up. Every time he shows up in the basement to give Jackson a sandwich and a glass of water, he yaps on and on about how obviously superior he is to the crowd in Beacon Hills.

Jackson hates most of the crew in Beacon Hills, too, but it’s a proprietary sort of hate. The hate of a big brother who mercilessly teases his younger sister but will beat the shit out of any boy who dares make her cry. The people in Beacon Hills are assholes, but they’re _his_ assholes, and he deeply resents Eli for thinking that he’s better than him.

When he first woke up in the basement, it had been to hands roughly searching him. His memory of what had happened was fuzzy. His car started making a funny noise and he pulled into the church parking lot to take a look. But when his phone wouldn’t turn on, he decided to lock the doors and stay in the car.

After an extremely boring half hour, he saw Danny’s car pull up next to his, and he got out, and that’s the last thing he remembered.

They guy searching him took his shoes and chained him to the wall by his ankle, and he flailed awake when he heard Wilma barking. He found her standing over him, growling and trying to protect him. “Hey, don’t – ” he had time to say, before the asshole hit her with a taser and she went down, whimpering. “You fucking prick, I’m gonna kick your ass for that,” Jackson snarled.

“Nothing on him, boss,” the man said, clearly unfazed. “Just his wallet.” He flips it open and says, “Wow, people still carry pictures of their family in this day and age?”

Jackson found his hands were unchained, so he snatched the picture back. “Get lost, asshole,” he said. They had done a professional photo shoot at Christmas the year before, and it had come with a few free wallet-sized pictures, so he had taken one of himself, Tanya, his parents, and Wilma, and tucked it away. He plays with it sometimes when he feels like things are escaping his control, reminding himself that no matter what happens, he’ll always have a home to go back to.

There’s a chuckle behind him, and that was when Eli stepped out of the shadows like the melodramatic little fucker that he is. “Oh, God, not _you_ ,” Jackson groaned. “Who the fuck did you make a deal with to pull this off? You couldn’t have done this even when you _did_ have magic.”

Ten minutes later, he wished he hadn’t asked, because Eli quite cheerfully tells him all about the deal he made and how superior he is and how he has the power to take down Beacon Hills and right about then, Jackson stopped listening. He checked on Wilma instead, who’s groggy and unhappy but okay. The man had leashed her to the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She’s not tied up as firmly as Jackson is, but she won’t be going anywhere while he’s there. She can just barely reach him, but he doesn’t have enough leverage to get the choke chain off of her.

“You’d better feed my dog, asshole,” he said to Eli, when he finally finished talking. “And don’t you dare go buy fucking Pedigree at the grocery store. She only gets organic dog food from The Honest Kitchen. You feed her crap and I’ll feed her your face.”

“They make organic dog food now?” Eli asked. “What’s the world coming to.”

With that, he had finally, _finally_ walked away. Jackson spent several hours bored out of his skull, trying to extract his leg from the chains. Just as his stomach is starting to growl, Eli comes back with a turkey sandwich and an apple for him, and a bowl of dog food that definitely isn’t organic. Wilma eats it anyway, with great gusto, while Jackson glowers at her.

“So, I have a proposition for you,” Eli says.

“Suck my dick,” Jackson says.

“No, that wasn’t it.” Eli seems amused. “You don’t have to be Deaton’s lap dog and play nice on the Druidic Council. I know that he took your magic away, just like he took mine away. The only reason you work with him is because you want it back.”

Jackson takes a large bite of his apple and pretends that Eli isn’t there.

“I can unbind it for you,” Eli says. “You could take your revenge on him, on all of them. Well . . .” His mouth curves into a smile. “Not on the boy in red. I’ve taken care of him myself. But there are plenty others to go around.”

“Look, you don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about,” Jackson says, “so why don’t you just shut the fuck up, okay? It’s God damned embarrassing.”

Eli kneels down in front of him. “Do you think I can’t see the want in you?” he hisses. “Do you think I didn’t see the things in your room, the spells you’ve carefully laid away for when you get your power back? Do you think I don’t understand how badly you want that power back? You haven’t forgotten. I know that you haven’t.”

“Yeah, well, unlike you, I have self-control,” Jackson says loudly. “So let me say this one more time in small words so your plebian mind can understand: piss. Off.”

Eli’s hand snakes out and grabs Jackson by the chin. “Maybe I should remind you,” he says, and Jackson feels the power flow out of Eli and into him.

It feels . . . good. Better than good. Amazing. He had felt it before, but not for years, that overriding wave of power that swept away everything in its path. A sort of strength that told him the entire world was at his feet, that he could have anything he wanted and nobody could stop him.

He grits his teeth against it, clenches his hands into fists, and yanks his face away from Eli, heaving for breath. “You son of a bitch,” he grinds out. “Do that to me again and I’ll fucking kill you. I’m not going to be like you. I made a promise to myself that I would never be that person again, and it had fucking nothing to do with Deaton or Stiles or anyone ‘forcing’ me to play nice. You’re not the sort of person who’s ever going to understand that, so get the _fuck_ out of my face.”

Eli stands up and dusts off the knees to his pants. “You say that now,” he says, “but you’ll change your mind after you’ve been down here for a few days.”

“Dream on, loser,” Jackson replies, as Eli goes up the steps and closes the door behind him.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It takes Sheriff Stilinski about an hour and a few strings pulled, a few favors called in that he had been saving up for an emergency, to get a dossier on Eli Whitaker so complete that he knows what brand of toothpaste the man uses. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so complete that it has a current residence in Beacon Hills listed for him.

“He might not be in town,” Chris says. “I mean, if the spell reached all the way to New England when Derek took Stiles there, there’s no reason he’s not casting from wherever he lives in Oregon.”

“Then who kidnapped Jackson?” Tom asks.

Chris sighs. “Fair point. But I still think I’m going to go talk to Stella.”

“Why, so she can lie to your face?” Tom says. “In what universe does she have any reason to cooperate with us? She clearly wants this pack wiped off the face of the planet.”

“Yes, but . . .” Chris grimaces. “I think it’s worth a try. Because of Jackson. Stella’s hardcore against werewolves, but Jackson isn’t a werewolf. He’s a human, practically still a child, and Eli has no reason to target him beyond petty revenge.”

“Stella might agree with his revenge, if she thinks that Eli shouldn’t have gotten his power stripped. That can’t have made her life easy.”

“No, I guess not. But Eli is becoming the sort of person we hunt, and . . . I feel like she should know about that, that’s all.”

Tom sighs. “Look, if you think it’ll help, I won’t stop you. You can check out his house while you’re up there. I can’t go – Stiles is too young now, he needs me around in the mornings when he wakes up. So I’ll stay here and run down anything local I can come up with. But don’t stay long. If I find him down here, we’re going to need you to back us up.”

“Okay.” The two men shake hands and Chris goes back into the house. Tom sighs again and gets in his Cruiser, heading back towards the station. He makes a couple of phone calls. Danny is glad to help, to perform some sort of computer witchery along with Mac, because it will keep him occupied and that will help him not worry as much about Jackson. The teenager is likewise thrilled to hear that they’ve discovered fairly solid evidence that Jackson isn’t the bad guy, although they’re still going to have to have a long talk about his chest of magical spells.

There’s no evidence of Eli being in Beacon Hills, but things could be worse. He’s got evidence that he _isn’t_ in Oregon; there’s been no activity on his credit card for the last month. He’s got a flag on all those cards and an APB out on his car.

The question is, where would he go? If he had planned to kidnap Jackson from the beginning – and there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t – then he wouldn’t want an apartment, wouldn’t want anywhere with neighbors that could hear a commotion. And he wouldn’t camp out in the woods, either, where anyone could stumble across him.

He would want a house, which means that the first thing Tom needs to do is go through the real estate listings and check out anywhere that’s been bought or rented recently. He pulls up that list and sends it to Scott, who’s officially delegating all the work. With Mac and Danny on the computer work, Scott sends Boyd and Isaac to check out the recently occupied houses. Boyd says they can pretend to be selling magazine subscriptions. He did it for a few weeks one summer and still knows the spiel.

Review of Eli’s credit card history reveals two interesting habits. He has a weakness for cheap Chinese take-out. There are four Chinese restaurants in town. Scott sends Erica and Lydia to go to each one, show Eli’s picture, and see if he’s been there at all. He also seems to like those electronic cigarettes, which Sheriff Stilinski frankly finds bewildering. There are only three places in town that sell them, so Allison and Scott go to check them out.

While they’re doing that, Sheriff Stilinski spends most of the day on the phone calling every company that Eli has an account with, to see if he left any forwarding information. It’s unlikely, but if he ordered something through Amazon, if he wanted to get a movie on pay-per-view, anything like that, might have left some trail. He calls the phone company to get his phone records, calls his relatives to see if they’ve talked to him recently.

By the end of the day, he’s found more than he hoped. Eli isn’t careful, not the way Stiles himself would be, not the way many of their adversaries have been in the past. That, or he doesn’t care about being found.

He’s ordered twice from a Chinese restaurant called Hot Wok. Although he’s picked up the order and paid in cash both times, it’s likely that he would order from somewhere relatively near his house.

Although there are no recent charges on the credit card, there was a hold put on it at a car rental place, where they rented him a Toyota Camry. It’s a common car, but they can be on the lookout for it now, and they have the license plate number.

Boyd and Isaac ruled out a lot of the empty houses, but there are two fairly close to the Chinese restaurant where nobody answered the door. They decide to stake out one, and Lydia and Erica stake out the other.

By then, it’s dinner time, and Sheriff Stilinski decides to head home and make sure that his son hasn’t worn Derek down to a thread.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Derek is perfectly happy to let Tom take over when he gets home from his long day at the sheriff’s station. He’s been receiving periodic text updates from the pack all day, so his mood isn’t as terrible as it could be. But keeping up with twelve-year-old Stiles is _exhausting_. They played lacrosse and played video games, they made cookies and ate pizza, they climbed trees and flew kites.

In a way, it’s fascinating to watch this child and imagine the man he was going to grow up to become. In another, it’s horrifying, to think of all the innocence being stripped away. Derek doesn’t regret getting the chance to meet this boy, even if he wishes it could have been under different circumstances. He does, however, want a nap.

So he collapses onto the sofa while he listens to Stiles chatter at his father about what they did today and Tom says he’s just going to make tuna salad and they can sit down and have a bite to eat and maybe watch some television. They wind up watching episodes of the Simpsons, and Stiles is bouncy and excited, talking about how he’s sure he’s seen these before in the future but he doesn’t remember them, so it’s like he’s seeing them for the first time a second time.

While they’re doing that, Sheriff Stilinski occasionally takes a call or starts typing at a computer at the table in the living room. He’s still clearly running down leads, corresponding with the others, and Derek allows himself to relax. They know who’s doing this; they know how it’s happening. That’s a mile above where they were this morning, and he falls into a light doze as they sit on the sofa together.

Deaton shows up at about ten thirty, with the potion, as promised. He says he’s been trying to locate Jackson using magical means, but hasn’t come up with anything solid. Eli must be shielding his residence somehow.

“Would that create a magical blank spot?” Derek asks.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, when Ruben Gutierrez got a hold of us during that whole mess originally, the sorcerer, Khan, had shielded this area. Jackson was the one who found it. He said it was like walking through a neighborhood of houses, but suddenly finding an empty lot.”

Deaton nods. “A good metaphor. Yes, that would happen.”

“Would you check out our most likely places?” Tom asks. “We’ve narrowed it down to about half a dozen houses that we think might be the place.”

“I can take a look,” Deaton says, “although I’ll caution you that if he’s only warded a room, or even just a small circle to keep Jackson in, I won’t be able to sense it from the outside.”

“Still worth a try,” Derek says. “Take Scott and Allison with you.”

Deaton nods. “Now, let’s give Stiles his medicine and hopefully we can reverse the spell or at least keep it from progressing while we track down the culprit.”

Stiles has fallen asleep on his father’s shoulder, but is easily roused. He was excited about getting to stay up so late, but hadn’t been able to actually do it. He says hello to Deaton, who tells him to drink it all in one go. It looks like it’s only a few swallows, and Stiles downs it without trouble. “Tastes kind of sweet,” he says, licking his lips.

Tom looks at Deaton. “Is something supposed to happen?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. I know some of the ingredients in this mixture, but some of them I had never even heard of, or at least never seen used in magic. Whatever the effect will be, I don’t know how long it might – ” Deaton breaks off as Stiles suddenly clutches at his forearm with a gasp of pain. “Stiles? Are you okay?”

“Oh, God, it burns,” Stiles says between clenched teeth. “It hurts so bad.”

Unthinking, Derek presses close to him, rubbing his hand up and down Stiles’ back. Stiles doesn’t flinch away, doesn’t seem to find it strange. He just curls up even tighter, one hand clutching at the place where Eli had originally left a mark on him. Derek can see the energy shifting, the tattoo that Eli had left starting to stand out again in vivid crimson.

“It’s trying to push the magic out, I think,” Deaton says, his voice as calm as ever. “Stiles, just breathe, okay? I think it’s working, so just stay with us.”

“Jesus Christing fuck – ” Stiles bites out, and it’s the first time Derek has heard him drop an f-bomb in days.

“Here, let me – ” Derek reaches out with one hand.

“No!” Stiles yanks his arm away. “No, Ravinder tried that and it only made it worse.”

Derek forgets to breathe for a minute. He hadn’t known that; nobody in the pack had known that. Stiles hadn’t been with them when Eli had originally done the spell, nobody could have told him that had happened. Stiles had _remembered_ that.

“Stiles, what classes did you take last semester?” he blurts out, before he can think about it.

“What?” Stiles looks up, face twisted from holding back the noises of pain he wants to make. “Uh, shit. PoliSci, uh, geology – oh God this really hurts like you don’t even _know_ – that crime and economics class. Other stuff. Jesus. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“It’s okay, take it slowly.” Tom kneels down in front of the sofa so they’re on eye level. “How about Malia, do you remember Malia?”

“What? No, I . . . who’s that?” Stiles looks around, suddenly frantic. “How did I get here, what’s going on?”

“It’s okay, Stiles, just try to stay calm,” Deaton says. “Your body is trying to fight off the magic that’s been done to you.”

“What magic? Who are you?” Stiles is clearly terrified now, and if his father wasn’t right there, he would have been off the sofa and out the door. He strangles out a whimper and bends his head down, involuntary tears streaming down his cheeks. His father talks him through several deep breaths. When he looks up, he blinks at Derek a few times and says, “Did I ever thank you for that awesome painting you did for my birthday? I remember getting it but I don’t remember thanking you. I did, right?”

“Yeah, you did,” Derek says, and Stiles starts panting for breath again.

It goes like that for what feels like eternity. Stiles would be fine for a few seconds, then lose his grip; he would remember everything and then nothing. The spell was going completely haywire, and it was all they could do to keep him calm. Finally, after almost an hour, the pain starts to fade, and he falls into an exhausted sleep.

“Jesus,” Derek says, pushing a hand through his hair. “How do you think he’s going to be when he wakes up?”

“Honestly, I don’t want to venture a guess,” Deaton says. “Tom, I would wake him again if I were you, in case he’s lost more time. But I think this is a very promising sign for a couple of reasons. Primarily, his memories are definitely still there. They haven’t been erased, just . . . made inaccessible somehow. That means that we _should_ be able to find a way to restore them. Secondly, the potion did have _some_ effect, even if it didn’t work out as well as we might have liked. I can keep tinkering with it. If I call Vincent and tell him what effects it had, he might have some ideas about what to do next.”

Derek nods, exhausted but hopeful for the first time in days. His Stiles is still there. They’ll get him back. They’ll find a way. He curls up on the sofa and is asleep before Deaton is out the door.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Like many hunters, Stella Jones’ full time job is related to her profession as a hunter. While Chris works in security and weapons, Stella has a business as a private investigator. He doubts she takes many cases, and she’s not listed in the yellow pages with anything more than a name. But she does have an actual office, and that works well for Chris, who wants this meeting to be on neutral ground. He doesn’t want to invade her home.

She isn’t thrilled to meet with him ever here in her office, but he was persistent and she eventually agreed. That doesn’t mean she’s feeling friendly, however. She greets him with her arms folded over her chest and says, “What do you want?”

“Lately we’ve been having trouble with a warlock in Beacon Hills,” Chris says. He doesn’t bother to sugarcoat it. “The sorcerer is Eli Whitaker.”

Stella grimaces slightly. “Doesn’t surprise me particularly. Last time I saw him, which was a few months ago, he was talking about going after the boy in red.”

“Nice of you to send me a note,” Chris remarks dryly. Stella just rolls her eyes, and he lets that go. “I’m not going to ask you to intervene on Stiles’ behalf. Or mine, for that matter. I can take care of myself, and for the most part, so can Stiles.” He doesn’t want her to know how bad things have gotten. “But Eli’s gone after a boy, a human boy, named Jackson. He’s Alan Deaton’s apprentice, and he’s abducted him, probably with the intent of making Deaton suffer.”

With a shrug, Stella says, “Can’t blame him for that, can we?”

“Do I blame him for being angry or upset that his magic was stripped? No. But that wasn’t my decision. The Druidic Council has their own rules. Whitaker broke them when he chose to perform black magic. He should accept the consequences.”

“Well, regardless of whether or not he should, he’s clearly decided he won’t,” Stella says. She takes out a pack of cigarettes and lights one, taking a long drag. “He’s not my problem anymore.”

Chris decides to appeal to her nature as a hunter, despite doubting that it will get him anywhere. “Look. I know that you’ve known him for a long time. I’m not going to ask if you think what he did to Stiles was wrong or right. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because he was one of us, and you know as well as I do what happens once someone starts using dark powers. They don’t stop. He’s going to get in further and further. He’s already made a deal with at least one devil, just to get enough magic to do what he’s done so far.” He gives her a moment to think about that. “Stella. This won’t end well. We’re going to have to put him down if we don’t stop him, sooner rather than later. You know that.”

“Fine,” Stella says, her voice short and clipped. “What do you want?”

“Anything you can tell me about him. Where he lives, where he’s worked, how he does his magic. You know the score.”

“Okay. I can give you all that. But only after Stilinski is dead and his pack destroyed.”

“Excuse me?” Chris says.

“I’ll help you find Eli and take him down. Dead or alive, depending on how deep he is at that point, whether or not he can be saved. But I’m going to let him finish this first.”

“Finish this. A vendetta that he has no business being on. Did you forget that Stiles was one hundred percent honest about everything he said and did up here? That he _was_ framed, by a hunter, no less?”

Stella shakes her head. “Not because of his vendetta. You’re right. Eli broke the rules and he’ll get what he deserves for that. But because someone needs to take the boy in red down. I don’t care whether you agree with me about it or not. That’s my opinion. So I’ll help you find Eli, when he’s done. And you should count yourself lucky that I’m not sending half a dozen men down to Beacon Hills to give him a hand.”

Chris rubs a hand over his face. “How do you see this ending, Stella? You do remember who Eli is dealing with, don’t you? This is the kid who took down Kali Steele. Sebastian Stone. He’s all but destroyed the Gutierrez family.”

“He certainly destroyed yours,” Stella retorts. “He killed your father, and neutered you.”

There’s a flash of anger on Chris’ face, but then he finds the humor in it, and smiles despite himself. “Oh, you think I’m not dangerous anymore, do you, Stella? You think I’m not capable of every bit as much destruction as the Stilinski kid? Okay. Let’s make a deal. If Eli destroys the Beacon Hills pack, I’ll work with you until we bring down Eli, and then I’ll retire and you can have my territory. But if we manage to put down Eli without your assistance, then _you_ will back me up at the Conclave the next year.”

Stella’s eyes have an unfriendly glint to them. “That’s one hell of a bargain, Argent. Okay. Deal.”

Chris extends his hand, and Stella shakes it.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	8. Chapter 8

Derek sleeps the entire night on the sofa in the rec room without twitching. He wakes up at around eight AM and flails for a moment before remembering where he had fallen asleep. His ears prick up as he hears footsteps, smells Scott and Allison’s familiar scent. Allison pokes her head into the other room and gives him her princess smile. “Hey, we brought some breakfast,” she says.

“Thanks.” Derek rubs a hand over his face and joins them in the kitchen. There’s a box of pastries, and they’ve gotten him some tea. “How’d the stakeout go last night?”

“Nothing at either place,” Scott says, but he seems to be feeling better. Some of his boundless enthusiasm has returned. “But hey, now that we know who we’re looking for, it’s only a matter of time, right?” He takes a bite out of a croissant sandwich and keeps talking with his mouth full. “Deaton checked out the houses for us and didn’t get any weird vibes.”

“But he said it’s important to note that he might not,” Allison adds. “Since Eli has teamed up with some . . . something . . . it’s almost impossible to predict what he can do or what the mojo would feel like.”

“I’m not sure about this whole thing where you get power from demons,” Scott says. “Deaton explained it a little but I was half asleep by then.”

Derek picks up a bear claw. “First things first. Don’t think Biblically. These aren’t that sort of demon. Demon is a broad term, sort of like faerie, with different subcategories. Like faeries, they tend to stay on their own plane of existence. They basically live to gather power and fight each other, but they aren’t _evil_ , in the exact sense of the word. They’re more like the absence of good _or_ evil. Neutral in the truest sense. Like magic itself. Magic is neither good or evil; it’s what you do with it that counts.”

“Okay,” Scott says. “So why do they make deals with humans?”

“To try to steal their power,” Derek says. “That’s why they bargain using something that helps them get their hooks in.”

“But Eli didn’t have any power, so why would a demon help him at all?” Allison asks.

“Because he can gain power,” Derek says. “Now that he has his magic back, he can gather power for the demon. He’ll _think_ he’s gathering it for himself, but in the long run, the demon will suck him dry. That’s what they do. Only someone who’s incredibly arrogant or incredibly desperate – or both – will make a deal with a demon.”

“In this asshole’s case, I’m going to go with both,” Scott says. He looks up as Allison’s phone chimes to indicate an incoming text. “What’s up?”

“It’s from my dad.” She looks down. “He’s back in town. He says Stella refused to help.”

“No surprise there,” Scott says. “But at least we’ve gotten far enough now that we probably won’t need it.” He claps Derek on the shoulder. “We’re gonna go before Stiles is up for the day,” he says. “We don’t want him any more confused than he’s already going to be. And by ‘we’re gonna go’ I actually mean ‘we’re gonna go wait outside so if the potion actually fixed him you can call us and we’ll come right back inside’.”

“Got it,” Derek says, with a nod, and the two of them leave. He edges towards the stairs again, listening to the noise of Tom’s footsteps as he heads towards the door. He finds that he’s holding his breath, and forces himself to let it out, reminding himself that they’re a lot closer to fixing this than they were a week ago.

“Dad?” Stiles mumbles a minute later.

“Hey, buddy. How are you feeling?”

There’s a pause, and Derek waits for the confusion and the questions, but all there is, is another mumble. “Okay, I guess.”

There’s a noise as Tom sits down on the edge of the bed. “You’ve been having some trouble with your memory, son. You might have lost some time. Can you tell me how old you are?”

“What?” Now there’s a little bit more life to Stiles’ voice, some confusion. “Nine . . . I just turned nine a month ago.”

Derek lets out a sigh. He tells himself that it’s not as bad as it could be. True, Stiles had lost more time. But it was only just over three years this time, and with the way the amount of time had been increasing each night, it could have been a lot worse.

“Okay, so you’ve lost a few years,” Tom says, clearly decided to understate the case so as not to alarm him. “Why don’t you get dressed and come downstairs for some breakfast, okay? And we’ll talk about it.”

“Okay.” Stiles still sounds strangely subdued. Derek frowns up the stairs as Tom comes down and helps himself to a pastry. A few minutes later, Stiles slumps down the stairs.

“This is Derek,” Tom says. “He’s a friend of mine and he’s going to look after you today.”

“Hi,” Stiles says, not really looking at him.

“Hey,” Derek says, feeling uncomfortable and intensely confused. Stiles still hasn’t even asked why he’s lost his memories, he hasn’t responded to his much-different appearance, he doesn’t seem to care about any of the things that have fascinated him on the previous days. “Are you feeling okay?” he asks, wondering if maybe the potion is still in effect, if he’s in any pain. All he gets is a shrug.

“Okay, look, kiddo,” Tom says. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but someone . . . took your memories. And we’re looking for that person to make him give them back.”

Stiles gnaws on his lower lip. “How?” he asks.

“You know how you read all those books about magic and I always told you magic wasn’t real?” Tom asks, and Stiles nods. “Yeah, I’m gonna have to eat some crow on that one. Magic is completely real. And that’s how your memories got stolen.”

After a moment, Stiles nods. “Okay.”

“Okay? Derek’s going to take good care of you, but I want you to call me if you need anything, or even if you just want to check in with me, okay?” Tom gives Stiles a big hug, then heads for the door.

Derek forces himself to smile at the nine-year-old Stiles. “Do you want to make some pancakes?” he asks.

“Not really,” Stiles says. “Can I just have some cereal?”

“Uh, sure.” Derek goes into the kitchen, wondering if he’s ever seen Stiles pass up an opportunity to make pancakes before. He can’t think of one. But he dutifully gets his alpha a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, pours in some milk, and gives him some apple juice to go with it. Stiles seems more interested in stirring the bowl than in actually eating. “So . . . what do you want to do?” Derek asks, and Stiles shrugs. “We could go for a walk,” Derek suggests. “Or watch a movie. Play a game.”

“I don’t care,” Stiles says, stirring his cereal.

Derek is so confounded by this that he does something he hates doing: asks Scott for help. He sends the other man a text that reads: ‘help, Stiles is quiet and doesn’t have opinions and it’s weird, how do I handle him?’

Scott replies immediately. ‘Is he still 12?’

‘No, he’s 9 now. Was he a miserable 9 year old?’

‘shit, yes,’ Scott sends back. ‘think, you fuckwit. his mom just died.’

Derek swears under his breath and wonders why he didn’t figure that out. They were all so braced for the possibility of Stiles getting set back before her death and wanting to see her, that he hadn’t thought about Stiles winding up caught in the immediate aftermath again. He takes a deep breath and wonders how to handle this. He thinks back to when he was fifteen and his family had just died. What would he have wanted someone to say to him?

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he finally says, and Stiles looks up, a flash of interest in his eyes. “I know that a lot of people are telling you that you shouldn’t be sad, that your mom is in a better place, that she’d want you to be happy. And do you know what? That is bullshit. Your mom _does_ want you to be happy. But she also understands that that’s going to be really hard for you. It’s okay to be sad that she’s gone.”

Stiles’ eyes go a little wide and his spoon falls into the bowl with a clank. “R-Really?”

“Yeah, really. It’s okay if you want to be angry. It’s okay if you want to cry all day and miss her like crazy. It’s okay to be upset.”

Stiles snuffles a little, his lower lip wobbling. “I hate doing things I used to do with her because then I cry and have bad dreams,” he admits, giving Derek a shy look. “Sometimes I get really scared and it’s hard to breathe.”

Derek reacts on instinct, pulling Stiles into a hug, cradling the trembling body against his own. “That’s okay, too. It’s okay if you’re not ready to do those things. It’s okay to get scared sometimes.” He rocks Stiles back and forth. “That’s okay, Stiles.”

Stiles lets out a few hitching sobs. “I don’t understand why she had to go away,” he says. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” Derek says. “I know.”

Stiles settles against him, and a few minutes later he stops crying. He wipes his nose and mumbles an apology.

“Don’t be sorry,” Derek says. “Now, come on. Eat your cereal and then we’ll go get some fresh air, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Stiles says.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

“So,” Eli says, sitting down across from Jackson. “Made any decisions?”

“Oh, I’ve made a lot of them,” Jackson says. “I’ve decided that I should really get a haircut. I’ve decided that my next Porsche is going to be red. I’ve decided what I’m going to get my mother for her birthday. I’m just chock full of decisions down here. It’s a great thinking environment, you enormous piece of crap.”

“Pithy,” Eli says, rolling his eyes. “We’re not enemies, Jackson. Don’t you understand that?”

“I’m chained up in a basement. You hexed my car and you fed my dog canned slop. In what way are you not my enemy?”

Eli leans back, folding his arms over his chest. “I know you want revenge on Deaton.”

“Look, you stinking turd nugget, you don’t know anything about me,” Jackson says. “I owe Deaton my life, so why don’t you shove it up your ass?”

“But that’s just the thing,” Eli says. “Don’t you see, you don’t owe Deaton anything. You think he saved you, but he didn’t. He hobbled you, brainwashed you. He saw the power you could have and he was afraid. _He’s_ the one who’s put you in chains. Not me.”

“Okay, for one thing, I don’t think Deaton has ever been afraid of anything,” Jackson says. “Secondly, what is so hard to grasp about the concept that I don’t want that fucking power?”

“That’s a lie and we both know it. Everyone wants power. Even if it’s only the power to protect themselves, to protect . . .” Eli reaches out and taps Jackson’s shirt pocket, where he’s tucked away the photograph. “Their family.”

“Don’t you dare go after my family,” Jackson growls. “I will burn you at the God damned stake.”

“I won’t,” Eli says. “But how do you know that nobody else will? Weren’t they hurt, the day Sebastian Stone was killed? You could have protected them, if you still had your power. You could heal Tanya of her disabilities, if you still had your power.”

“Maybe,” Jackson allows, “but the sort of person I’d be isn’t the one who would bother. Don’t forget that I’ve been down this road. I know what it does to me. So just fuck off.”

Eli grabs him by the chin, wrenching Jackson around so he has to look at him. Wilma gets to her feet with a growl, but with the leash tied around the banister and the choke chain they’ve put on her, she can’t get to them. Jackson holds his gaze, not flinching. “Listen to me, you ignorant little punk,” Eli hisses. “You have no idea how much power I have at my disposal. When I’m done with the boy in red, I’m going to deal with you. I’m going to deal with Deaton. I will raze this town to the ground if I have to. You can either be on my side, or you can be in my way. And I don’t think you’ll like what happens if you’re in my way.”

Jackson rolls his eyes. “Melodramatic little fucker, aren’t you,” he says, and Eli releases him, shoving him back against the wall.

He’s clearly about to launch into another tirade when his phone rings. He glowers at Jackson and then snatches it up. “What?” he snarls, but then his demeanor changes. “Oh. I didn’t realize . . . no, it’s fine. Are you sure?” Eli begins to pace, rubbing a hand over his bald scalp. “All right. I appreciate the heads up. No, it shouldn’t matter, I have contingency plans in place. I’ll keep you posted.”

Jackson waits until he’s hung up, then says innocently, “Bad news?”

“Only for you,” Eli says, and stomps back up the stairs, shouting, “We’re moving! Get everything ready!”

Jackson thinks this over. Eli apparently isn’t the one calling the shots. That’s interesting. He thinks back to Oregon, back to Ruben Gutierrez, who had clearly been an idiot yet had somehow come up with a very thorough, dangerous plan. This has the same fingerprints all over it.

“Someone is pulling their strings,” he says to Wilma, who whines and again tries to reach him. “It’s okay, girl. You stay over there. Everything’s going to be fine.”

He’s not afraid of Eli, but in that moment he realizes that whoever is giving Eli the orders, he is afraid of them.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It’s certainly not life with Stiles as he’s used to, but Derek has to admit a small, sneaking amount of joy that at least he doesn’t have to keep his distance anymore. Nine-year-old Stiles has quickly decided that Derek is the best person in the world, and spends pretty much the entire day either in his lap, or getting piggy-back rides. He has no real concept of how big he is now, and he falls over at least twice every hour, but Derek is more than strong enough to carry him.

They tour the property and Stiles plays in the mud by the pond and they play with pretend dinosaurs and for the first time in a very long time, Derek just allows himself to be a kid again. He gets Stiles an ice cream cone and they eat it sitting on a bench in the sun.

He gets texts periodically. There are still no signs of life at either of the two houses that they’ve decided are likely. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If Eli had prepared properly, he might not have to leave the house for weeks. If Derek had his way, they would just break in and find out, but it’s a dangerous prospect that nobody wants to try unless they absolutely have to.

“If we need to, we will,” Tom says, when Derek texts him about this. “But I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Derek thinks they’re there, but he’s also keenly aware that any sudden moves might get Jackson killed at this point. Of course, he wouldn’t cry about that, but he figures they should avoid it if at all possible.

It starts to rain in the late afternoon, so they head inside. It’s easy enough to keep Stiles entertained and keep him safe while the others take turns staking out the houses and check out additional possibilities. Derek makes macaroni and cheese for dinner and plunks Stiles in front of the television. They’re still eating when Deaton calls and says he’s going to stop by.

He arrives about fifteen minutes later, shakes off his umbrella and props it up in the front hallway as he comes inside. “So, I’ve been thinking things over, and I do want to continue to tweak the potion that Vincent gave me,” he says, “but I think that might take some time. I might have a stop-gap measure to keep his memory loss from advancing, now that I know the source of the spell.”

“Okay, out with it,” Derek says, trying not to growl.

“When Stiles first had the spell put on him by Eli, we were talking about various ways that we might negate its effects,” Deaton says, unperturbed by Derek’s attitude. “At the time, I thought putting a mountain ash circle around his arm would help. It would cut the spell off from the rest of his body. Now, we couldn’t do that then, because it would have concentrated the destructive power of the spell in his arm. But it might work now.”

“It might,” Derek says.

Deaton nods. “Think of that spell as a gate that Eli is using to get in and out of Stiles’ body. We’d simply be putting up another fence beyond it.”

Derek pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing in loose spikes. “Might as well try it,” he says.

Nine-year-old Stiles doesn’t have much interest in why they’re telling him to wear a wooden arm band. He lets them put it on without argument, glued to the Disney movie that Derek has put on the television for him. Tom is working late, and probably won’t be there until the morning. Stiles also has no interest in staying up until midnight.

“It’s my bedtime,” he solemnly informs Derek at eight thirty. “I need to take a bath and brush my teeth.”

“Sure,” Derek says, ushering him up the stairs. It amuses him somewhat, but in truth he thinks it’s not funny. Stiles rarely talks about the months after his mother died, but Derek knew that he had to spend a lot of time taking care of himself. It would have been like him to continue to impose his mother’s rules upon himself. “I wonder when you turned into such a trouble maker,” he tells Stiles, as the nine-year-old draws a bath.

Stiles makes a face at him. “I’m not a trouble maker,” he says. “Mom said I was a trouble _magnet_.”

“Can’t both be true,” Derek says, shaking his head. Stiles gets in the bath and seems affronted by their lack of bath toys. Derek washes his hair for him. He studiously brushes his teeth and, in the lack of real pajamas, puts on a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“Will you read me a story?” he asks.

Derek thinks of their library, loaded up with reference books and literature. “I don’t think we have any here that you’d like.”

“Tell me a story, then,” Stiles says, climbing into bed.

“Uh, sure,” Derek says, fumbling around. He suddenly has a keen, vivid memory of his father tucking him into bed at night, his father telling him stories. The wave of loss and grief is so strong that he nearly chokes on it. It’s like that sometimes, when he just misses his family so badly that he could cry. But he takes a deep breath and steadies himself out, and starts telling one of the stories his father had told him.

Stiles stays awake until the end and then says, “Thank you, Derek,” before curling up on his side. Derek stays with him until he’s fallen asleep, then sets the alarm on his phone for eleven forty-five and flops down next to him. He doesn’t even care if Stiles wakes up and is confused. He just wants things to be normal for a little while.

He falls into a deep, hard sleep, so when his alarm goes off, he just grunts a little and fumbles with the phone. Stiles wakes up, too, and whispers, “What is it?”

“How about a midnight snack?” Derek asks, rubbing his eyes.

Stiles’ eyes go wide. “Yeah!”

Derek gets out of bed and hoists Stiles up over his shoulder. The younger boy laughs and kicks, but doesn’t really struggle. Derek carries him downstairs and plops him into a chair, and starts making them cocoa. “I shouldn’t have sugar this late at night,” Stiles informs him.

“How about warm milk for you and cocoa for me?” Derek asks.

“Okay,” Stiles says, kicking his legs back and forth and seeming confused at how long they are.

Deaton comes in from the rec room, where he’s been waiting, and checks his watch. “It should be soon, if anything happens,” he says, and sits down across from Stiles. Derek asks him if he wants some cocoa, and he says no, but he’d love some tea if they have any. Their tea cabinet currently has twenty-four varieties of tea, so Derek says sure. Stiles gets inquisitive about all the different kinds of tea and wants to sniff them all.

“Oooh, this one smells weird, can I have some?” he asks, sniffing at the lapsang souchong. Before Derek can answer, he’s already moved on. “This is Earl Grey, I know this one, my mom drank it. This one is kind of spicy. Is it spicy?” He continues on in this vein while Derek shakes his head, occasionally interjects, and makes their drinks.

He eventually gets Stiles to sit down with his warm milk and his peanut butter crackers, then checks his watch as he gives Deaton his tea. It’s two minutes past twelve.

“Nothing’s happened yet,” he says in an undertone, looking up at Deaton.

“Mm hm,” is all Deaton says, blowing on the top of his tea to cool it. Stiles is happily munching on his milk and crackers, pausing occasionally to yawn or rub his eyes. “How are you feeling, Stiles?”

“Okay,” Stiles says, blinking over at him.

“Can I see your arm?” Deaton asks, and Stiles holds it out while still eating crackers with his right hand. Deaton rubs his finger along the place where the spell would be. “I don’t feel anything. It might have tried to activate, failed, and gone dormant again. I don’t know what sort of timer he has on it. For the moment, as long as he keeps the arm band on, I think he should be okay.”

“Great,” Derek says, and lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “That’s really great.”

Deaton gives him a reassuring smile and gets to his feet. “Why don’t you bring him by the clinic first thing in the morning? He can spend some time with the dogs. Maybe we can check in with Peter, let him know what we’ve found out so far, and see if he has any ideas.”

“Okay,” Derek says, nodding. “That sounds good. What do you consider ‘first thing’ in the morning?”

“Oh, I’ll be up at dawn,” Deaton says. “I’ve been working on trying to find Jackson. He’s my apprentice, and I have several ways that I could use to locate him. So far none of them have worked, but I had an idea while I was waiting. The only reason it wouldn’t have worked is because they’ve warded him in somehow. So I want to try looking for Wilma. They might have placed a warding spell directly on Jackson but neglected to ward the dog.”

“Don’t you need to have some of her fur or something like that to do that?” Derek asks.

“I have some of her blood. Wilma is a canine blood donor.”

“Jackson’s dog is a . . . you know what, forget it, nothing about Jackson surprises me anymore,” Derek says, rubbing his hand over his face. “Call and wake me if it works out. Otherwise we’ll be there around eight.”

“Okay. Good night, Derek.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Stiles stares up at the ceiling, feeling confused and frightened but not wanting to say anything. Not even to Derek, this new wonderful person in his life who seems to understand him. He thinks back to his father finding him in the hallway at the hospital, his father gripping him tightly and saying, “You’re so strong, Stiles, you’re going to be okay.”

He has to be strong, has to be okay, because his father needs him to be, because his mother would want him to be. Derek told him that it was all right to be afraid or sad, and he hopes that Derek is right, but still, he can’t go crying about it every time he wants to. But he _is_ afraid, and not just because he’s too tall and his hair is weird and spiky and he’s lying in a strange bed in a strange house with a strange wooden band around his arm. He can’t say why he’s afraid. He only knows that he is.

He thinks twice about waking Derek but decides against it each time, because it’s not Derek that he wants. It’s his mother. His mother, who makes the best cinnamon muffins and who has the prettiest smile and who’s the only person who can say his name the right way, Przemysław, just like –

_Przemysław?_

Stiles sits up. “Mommy?” he whispers, into the dark room.

_Przemysław, can you hear me?_

“Mommy, where are you?” he asks, looking around. Derek stirs a little.

_Shhhh, sweetheart, you don’t want to wake your friend. I’m waiting outside for you. Come down to me, okay?_

Stiles hesitates. Something doesn’t feel right about it. His father had said his mother couldn’t come back – that she would if she could, but death didn’t work like that. His mother was in a very far away place, and someday he would join her there, but until then he would have to be patient. He would understand if he was older.

_It’s okay if you’re scared, baby,_ his mother’s voice whispers. _But I just wanted to see you so badly, it was like the way opened up for me._

Stiles believes that, because he believes that his mother could do anything. He climbs out of bed, trembling a little. He wants to see his mother more than anything else in the universe. It’s okay if he’s scared. “Where are you?” he whispers again.

_I’m outside, right out the back door,_ she tells him. He jogs eagerly down the stairs and peeks through the back door and there she is. She’s wearing her favorite dress, the one they had buried her in, a white sundress covered in daisies. Her hair is long and falls past her shoulder in curls, even though she had lost most of it in the last month of her life, and her smile is just like he remembers.

“Mommy!” Stiles throws the door open and runs out the back door. But he goes right through her ghostly form.

_Oh, honey,_ her voice says, as she continues to smile at him. _You can’t touch me. Not yet. I just need you to do something first,_ she adds, and Stiles nods eagerly. _I need you take off that wooden bracelet you’re wearing._

“What?” Stiles blinks at her, then looks at the wooden bracelet, remembers Derek’s very firm voice as he said not to take it off, at all, ever. He remembers wearing it in the bath and thinking it was fun to slide it around with soap. “I’m not supposed to.”

_It’s okay,_ his mother says. _You trust me, right?_

“Yeah, but . . .” Stiles hesitates. “Why do I need to take it off?”

_That’s how it works, baby._

“But why?” Stiles persists.

_Because I said so,_ she replies. _Because I’m your mother and I know best._

Stiles takes a step backwards, his eyes going wide, head shaking back and forth. “My mom would never say that,” he says. “She always tried to explain things to me. She never said ‘I said so’. Even if I asked ‘why’ fifteen times in a row.”

_Przemysław, please, I need you to do it or I’ll have to go away,_ the woman in the white dress says.

Stiles shakes his head again, feeling horror and fear well up in his throat. “She wouldn’t,” he insists. “Mommy wouldn’t tell me to do something but not tell me why.”

There’s a pause, and then the translucent figure wavers, blips, like a television with bad reception. A moment later, she’s gone, and standing in her place is a very solid-looking man, a few inches shorter than Stiles and with a bald head. “All right, I tried to be nice about this,” he snarls, marching forward. Stiles backpedals, and a few moments later feels a rush of wind as a wolf jumps past him and tackles the man to the ground.

Derek half-turns, melting back to his human form as he wrestles with Eli. “Stiles, get inside!” he shouts. “Call your father!”

Stiles turns to run, but an enormous gust of wind seizes him and pulls him off his feet and into the yard. He rolls over and tries to scramble to his feet, only to find himself midair again. He sees Eli standing in the middle of a miniature tornado. Derek has likewise been yanked into midair and is scrambling for purchase. Eli reaches into a pouch and pulls out a handful of bluish-purple dust that he hurls into the winds. Derek’s form immediately begins to hack and convulse.

“Stop, stop!” Stiles wails, seeing Derek’s body twist in an effort to escape. When nothing happens, he reaches down and yanks the wooden bracelet off his arm, dropping it to the ground.

A moment later, he hits the dirt with a thump. Derek does too, and he shudders and tries to get up, but his body is covered with what look like burns, his skin red and blistered. His body is still convulsing even as he attempts to get to his feet. Stiles crawls towards him, but then Eli seizes him by the wrist. His thumb presses into the place on his forearm where Deaton had checked earlier, and everything goes black.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is almost over what will I dooooo

 

Scott is jolted out of a restless sleep when his phone starts ringing shrilly in his ear. He groans and fumbles for it in the dark, because he doesn’t ignore phone calls at three AM even when things _aren’t_ weird. Besides, it’s Derek’s ringtone, and he doubts that Derek would call him for anything other than a dire emergency. He clears his throat and manages to swipe to accept. “Sup,” he says sleepily.

For a moment there’s only silence on the other end. Then a rasping noise like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. It takes Scott’s sleep-soaked mind a minute to realize that something is wrong. He sits up and demands, “Derek? Are you there, can you hear me?”

“Hurt,” Derek rasps. “Bad.”

“I’ll be right there, hold on,” Scott says, scrambling out of bed. He grabs Allison by the shoulder and shakes her. She fumbles for the light as he tugs her out of bed by her arm. “Derek’s in trouble,” he says, and Allison’s immediately one hundred percent awake and headed down the stairs. She’s wearing only an oversized T-shirt and underwear, but that doesn’t bother her. It doesn’t bother Scott, either, who’s clad in only boxer shorts. It’s a warm summer night, and all of them are used to going underdressed at this point.

He drives to the den as quickly as the car will let him, taking turns on two wheels and hitting eighty miles per hour on the straightaways. Allison makes phone calls while he drives. The first two are to Erica and Isaac, the next rung down on the phone tree. Then she calls her father and Sheriff Stilinski.

They’re still the first to reach the den, and Scott pulls up in a screech of tires and a shower of dirt. He’s out of the car and about to grab the fence when he realizes it’s still turned on. “Shit,” he says, fumbling for the remote. Allison has the fence disarmed before he can find it, and he throws himself up as quickly as he can. She clambers up behind him.

Scott follows his nose and finds Derek behind the house, naked and on his stomach, skin red and raw, his entire body trembling. He reaches out to grab him, and Derek snarls at him. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s me,” Scott says.

“Don’ touch me,” Derek rasps at him. “Wolfsbane.”

“Shit,” Scott says again, and then Allison is there, gently rolling Derek into recovery position. “Derek, do you know what kind?” he asks, and Derek shakes his head.

“We’ll have to burn it out,” Allison says, and Derek whimpers a little but nods. It’ll hurt like hell, but Scott knows it’s the best remedy. After that, he’ll be able to actually heal. She’s already running into the house to get what they’ll need.

Derek’s fist clenches in the dirt, claws digging furrows into the soft ground. “He – took him,” he chokes out.

“Stiles?” Scott asks.

Derek nods, a jerky motion. “Tried to stop him. But he – ” His voice breaks off as he gives another spasm.

“We’ll find him,” Scott says. “Okay? Do you hear me? We’ll _find_ him.” He looks up as he hears more tires, people shouting. He thinks about going to find them, but decides he needs to stay with Derek. Allison comes skidding back out of the house a minute later holding a bag of rags, a bottle of alcohol, and a lighter.

“I’ve never actually seen this done,” she says, trying not to betray her nervousness.

“Let’s do it one limb at a time,” he says. A few others are rounding the house now. “Go see the others. Stiles is gone, Eli took him. Talk to your dad and Papa Stilinski.”

Allison nods. That, she can handle. She gets to her feet as Boyd and Lydia both come up next to Scott. Lydia says a very unladylike word, and then starts helping Scott soak the rags in alcohol and wrap them around Derek’s legs. Boyd holds his shoulders down while Scott sets them alight. Derek howls and screams, but Boyd and Lydia keep him down.

It takes about ten minutes to get each limb done, then his torso, and finally, his neck. Scott doesn’t dare touch his face. Derek is trying to push to his feet even though Scott knows he has to be in staggering amounts of pain. “Hey, lie still, medic’s orders,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

Derek shakes his head. “Not sure. Woke up, bed was empty. Felt Stiles. He was scared. Came down, Eli was here. Tried to attack him – he summoned up a tornado and filled it with wolfsbane. I saw him grab Stiles, and then he was gone.”

“Shit,” Scott says. “Lydia, Boyd, stay with him. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He goes to find Allison.

She’s inside with Tom and Chris, both of whom have identical grim looks on their face, and she’s just queuing up the security footage. “He just – walked right through the electric fence,” she says, shaking her head at Scott. “Just walked right through it.”

“Fucking sorcerers,” Scott mutters. “Then what?”

“I’m not sure,” Allison says. “Stiles comes out the backdoor and it looks like they talk for a minute. I mean, Stiles wouldn’t remember him. But the security cameras don’t have sound so I can’t be sure of what they’re saying. Why would Stiles go outside?”

Chris shakes his head. “We might never figure that out. For all we know, Eli called him on the phone and said he was delivering pizza.”

“No, he used magic,” Derek says, and all of them jump. Lydia and Boyd are holding him up, since his legs don’t want to support him. “I heard . . . what Stiles said. As I came outside. He said . . . his mother . . . wouldn’t tell him to do something . . . but not tell him why.”

“Shit,” Tom says, with feeling. “That asshole got into his head. How the fuck did he do that?”

“Protection spells . . . change and grow . . . with the person,” Derek pants. “Stiles was . . . so far back. It didn’t . . . work anymore. Should’ve . . . should’ve thought of it. Should’ve . . .”

“For God’s sake, Derek, sit down before you fall down,” Scott says, and Boyd and Lydia get him into a chair. “It makes sense, though. Without the protection spell, he could’ve cast on Stiles using a photograph, and God knows those are easy to come by. He’s been in the paper nineteen Goddamned times.”

“What now?” Lydia asks.

Chris checks his gun. “We check those two houses. Whether they want us to or not.”

“What if they just kill Stiles before we can get to him?” Boyd asks.

“They won’t. If they wanted him dead, he’d be dead. They’re still working on him.” Chris shakes his head quickly. “I have everything we’ll need in my car. Allison, you’re running point on the house on Maple street; I’ll take the one on Hildale. Pick three people for each team.”

“I’m going,” Derek pants.

“No,” Allison says, though she squeezes his shoulder. “You’re too weak. We’ll take care of this. I’ll take Scott, Erica, and Lydia. Dad, why don’t you take Boyd, Isaac, and Papa Stilinski. Mac and Danny will stay with Derek.”

“Okay,” Chris says. “Suit up.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Jackson is asleep when the door to the basement bangs open and he hears the wailing of a child. At least, it sounds like a child. He’s startled when Eli comes down the stairs, dragging Stiles with him. Stiles is screaming at the top of his lungs in protest, and then Wilma starts to cry too, adding her howls to his.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Jackson says, clapping his hands over his ears as Eli flings Stiles into a heap. Jackson expects Stiles to get to his feet and try to murder the shit out of him, or at least get away, but he doesn’t. He just curls up and sobs. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing that I wasn’t prepared for,” Eli says, trying to catch his breath. “I expected I would need to physically get a hold of him at some point, but had to wait until he had regressed enough that his protection spell was no longer active.”

Jackson considers this, taken in context with the phone call the day before and the sudden move. He hates this basement even more than the last one. The heat is shoddy, and he’s chained to a radiator instead of to the wall, so every time the heat comes on, it starts to melt the rubber sole of his shoe. There are only two windows, each of them half-sized, far too small for anyone to squirm through.

“Nah, you’re lying,” he finally says. “They got too close, didn’t they. They finally figured out how to stop your spell, so you had to go nab him so you could finish it here.”

“Six to one half dozen of the other,” Eli says with a shrug. “The important part is that now I _can_ finish it.” He nudges the crying Stiles with his toe, then drags him over to the radiator so he can chain him up as well. “I’d say he’s about five years old now. One, two more nights should do it. Then I can slit his throat and render the Beacon Hills pack alpha-less.”

Jackson studies him for a long minute before he says, “You’re an idiot.”

“Oh, really,” Eli drawls. “How did you come to that stunning conclusion?”

“I just, I’m trying to think of a better way to piss off people in Beacon Hills,” Jackson says, “but you’ve really hit on it. Way to go.” He gives the warlock a thumbs-up. “Congratu-fucking-lations.”

“They can’t find me,” Eli says. “They haven’t the least idea where I am.”

“Uh, yeah, they will,” Jackson says. “I mean, you had to move because they already found you once, right? So you took us through a little portal and now we’re in some _different_ basement, probably on the other side of town. You think they won’t find you here just as easily as they found you there?”

“Oh, they might,” Eli says, “but I doubt they can do it within two days.” With that, he turns and goes up the stairs.

Jackson rolls his eyes and looks at Stiles, huddled up in the corner. He’s giving hitching little sobs. “God, shut _up_ ,” Jackson growls, and the boy only cries harder. Jackson sighs and reminds himself that as much as he detests Stilinski on a day-to-day basis, being a jerk isn’t going to help. Stiles might be the legendary boy in red, but now he’s just a five-year-old boy who’s undoubtedly confused and terrified.

“Hey,” he says, gentling his tone. “Hey, kid. Hey.” Jackson gestures to Wilma. She’s chained up on the other side of the basement, which puts her closer to Stiles than to him. At his gesture, she pads over to Stiles and nudges his elbow. He lifts his tear-streaked face and looks around. “Hey. You okay?”

“I want my mommy,” Stiles says, face screwed up like he’s going to cry again.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I want mine too,” Jackson says. “I’m Jackson. Okay? What’s your name?”

“Przemysław,” the boys says, sniffling.

“Uh, sure, whatever,” Jackson says. “How about Stiles, okay? I’m gonna call you Stiles.”

Stiles pulls his knees up to his chest, eyeing him cautiously. “Why?”

Jackson starts to say something pithy, but then remembers that this is Stilinski he’s dealing with, and ‘why’ was probably his first word. “Well, your name is kinda hard to pronounce unless you’re Polish,” he says, “and I’m not Polish.”

“What are you?” Stiles asks.

“American,” Jackson says firmly, since he has no idea of his lineage and doesn’t want to get into a long discussion about it. At least Stiles has stopped wailing, and is gingerly petting Wilma. After days without petting, she’s appreciating it immensely, pushing her face into his hand. “Are you hurt at all?”

“No, b-but I don’t know where I am or how I got here and – and that guy was really mean!” Stiles says.

“Yeah, he’s a class A dou – butthead,” Jackson modifies, and is rewarded with a childish snicker. “Some people made him really mad about something and now he’s taking it out on us, but we’re gonna be okay, because your dad and my dad are looking for us. And your dad is a detective, right?”

Stiles nods. “He’s the _best_ detective,” he says.

“Right. So we’re gonna be totally fine. That’s why you don’t need to cry. You’re a big kid now, right? How old are you?”

“Five.”

“Okay, so, five-year-olds don’t cry,” Jackson tells him. “Not when they’re big, tough five-year-olds like you. And when your dad gets here, he’s gonna be really impressed with how brave you were.”

Stiles sniffles. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Jackson says. “It’s the middle of the night, so why don’t we get some sleep, okay? He’ll come down and bring us some breakfast in a little bit.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, curling up as best he can, resting his head on Wilma’s flank as a pillow.

“Great,” Jackson mutters. “This is just great.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Allison’s destination is closer than Chris’, so she’s reported in by the time they reach it. Empty, she says; it looks like the house might have been bought but nobody has moved in yet. Tom feels the knot in his stomach grow tighter as he studies the small one-story house that they’ve surrounded. They can see through the garage door windows that there are no cars inside. Hopefully, nobody is home. Hopefully, Stiles and Jackson are inside somewhere.

Chris picks the lock, because they’re going to value stealth over anything else. They cover the first floor quickly and find nothing. The furniture is sparse and there are practically no decorations of any kind. Chris nudges open the basement door, holding his gun steady while he flicks the flashlight over the stairs and starts down.

“Nothing,” he calls up to Tom, using a regular tone now that it’s clear that the house is empty. “But they _were_ here.”

Tom goes down the stairs and flicks the lights on. There are rungs installed in the wall, and chains dangling from them. A bowl of water in the corner, presumably for the dog. “Shit,” he says, and loses his temper, kicking the bowl and scattering drops of water everywhere. “Shit!”

“They were here recently,” Boyd says, coming down behind them. “I can smell them. And in the kitchen. Someone cooked dinner there, only a few hours ago.”

“Why did they move?” Isaac asks, staying at the top of the stairs. He hates basements almost as much as Stiles does. “How could they know we were closing in on them?”

“Stella.” Chris rubs a hand over his face. “That _bitch_. She must have called and warned him. If he knew that we had figured out who was responsible, he would know that it wasn’t safe for him to stay here. But he must have had a second location prepared.”

“They never left, though,” Isaac says. “We were watching the house twenty-four/seven.”

“He opened a Way,” Boyd says. “Like that sorcerer did this past spring, the Falcon. You can’t build them anywhere, but if he was prepared for the possibility, he must have been able to do it.”

“Can that be traced?” Tom asks.

“I don’t think so, but maybe,” Boyd says. “Do you want me to call Dr. Deaton?”

“Yeah. Get him down here.” Tom shakes his head and tries to rein in his temper. “Chris, if you could update the others. Isaac, you’re with me. We’re going to search this place from stem to stern. They might have left something behind, something that would give us some clue about where they’re going.” He rubs both hands over his face as he goes up the stairs. He’s barely slept in days, and he hates to admit it, but he’s getting too old for this shit. The days when he could pull an all-nighter by downing a few cups of espresso are long since past.

At least it’s not all for naught. The men emptied the house, but their fingerprints are everywhere. While Deaton is working on the possibility that the Way can be traced, along with the spell he wants to do to trace Wilma, Tom heads to the police station with Chris. He quickly ascertains that he has five different sets of prints, and three of them come up with results. That’s not surprising; hunters often have scrapes with the law. They don’t usually wind up serving time for it, but they’re in the system nonetheless.

“Well, who do we have here,” Tom says, rolling his eyes so hard that he thinks they’re going to leave his skull. “Marcos fucking Gutierrez.”

Chris shakes his head wearily. “They just don’t quit.”

“Sooner or later they’re going to have to forfeit because they’ll be out of players,” Tom remarks. “Okay. What about these two names, do you know them?”

“Luther Dwyer is one of Stella’s men. That’s not too surprising. The other . . .” Chris squints at it and rubs his hand over his face. “I don’t recognize it, but since Stiles thoughtfully compiled a list of all the known hunter associates, let me see if I can run it down.” He pulls out his phone and taps at it for a minute. “Okay, yeah. Craig Thurston is a freelancer who typically works with the Nazario family. Wonder if Ariah knows he’s here.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me either way,” Tom says. “Let’s hope to hell that one of those three is the one who’s currently renting the house they’ve got Stiles and Jackson stashed away in.”

“It won’t be Gutierrez,” Chris says. “That family knows damned well that the entire hunter world is watching their every move. But the other two maybe. I’ll go through my channels, you go through yours?”

“Yeah. And while we’re waiting for the bureaucracy, I’ll call Mac and Danny, who can probably get us a lot more, a lot faster.”

“Deal. Keep me posted.”

Tom gets on the phone and talks briefly to Danny, who’s relieved to have something he can do, some way he can help. The rest of the pack has met back at the den. Tom asks to talk to Scott. “Look, I want you to go back around to the houses we ran down last time. Run them down again. Don’t just say ‘hi, do you happen to have anyone captive in your basement’. Ask if you can go in and look around. People in this town know you guys, they trust you. Odds are good that most of them will let you. Don’t push, if they don’t want to let you in. Just note it and move on.”

“What if that spooks them?”

“Then they’ll move again,” Tom says. “But they’re going to run out of places to go eventually. In order to go through a Way, you have to have the other end prepared. The door already has to be there. If we can force them through different places, eventually they’ll have to walk or take a car and stop being able to swoop around under our noses.”

“Okay. Got it.”

Tom hangs up and goes to worse, scouring through the financial and phone records of the three men that they’ve been able to track down. His phone buzzes about twenty minutes later, and he hopes it’s not actual work he’ll need to attend to. “What is it, Sandy?”

“Uh, Derek Hale is here to see you and he looks . . .”

“Shit. Send him back,” Tom says, and stands up so he can catch Derek as he practically falls through the doorway. “You should be resting.”

“Dude, that’s what I said,” Erica says. “He wasn’t having it.”

Tom grimaces. Derek’s face is still red and swollen, and he looks like crap. “Sit down, son.”

“Give me something to do,” Derek says. “Please.”

“Yeah, okay,” Tom says, and shuffles around to find a stack of papers. “Go through all of this. Look for anything with a Beacon Hills area code and circle it. Erica, you too,” he adds, giving her a different stack, and she nods and accepts it. “Let’s get to work.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Jackson wakes up again to Stiles tugging at his shirt sleeve. He grunts and bats him away before recovering his faculties. “What’s up, short stop?” he mumbles.

Stiles’ face is solemn in the dim light coming through the half windows. “I have to pee,” he says.

Jackson can’t hold back a snort of laughter. The legendary boy in red, telling him that he has to pee. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “There’s a bucket over there. You should be able to just barely reach it.”

“Okay.” Stiles fumbles with his pants and then looks down, confused. “My hands are too big.”

“Yeah, wait ‘til you get your pants down,” Jackson says, and Stiles blinks at him, the confusion melting back into fear. “Hey, uh, okay. Have you ever read Alice in Wonderland? Or seen the movie?”

“My mom told me the story,” Stiles says, chewing on his lip anxiously. Jackson notes that this is a nervous habit with a long history.

“Well, you know how she ate a mushroom and then got really big?” Jackson asks, and Stiles nods. “The bad guys gave you a mushroom like that, and it made you big.”

“I don’t remember eating a mushroom,” Stiles says, clearly doubting the veracity of this story.

“It wasn’t technically – it was a magic spell, okay?” The explanation seemed simpler than ‘you’re actually twenty years old’, but not if Stiles is going to be pedantic about it. Fortunately, at this, Stiles nods a little. “These guys have lots of magic, that’s how they kidnapped you and that’s why you’re bigger than you remember being, now go pee in the corner.”

“Okay.” Stiles crawls as far as he can before getting to his knees and trying to aim for the bucket. It only sort of works.

Jackson lets his head thud against the wall, grumpy and exhausted. He doesn’t exactly sleep well on a concrete floor, everything from the waist up too cold while the radiator tries to burn his feet off. The cuff is absorbing heat, too, and he’s going to have a nasty mark around his ankle. He’s thirsty and hungry and now he’s going to have to take a piss in front of Stilinski, too. And if they’re down here another twenty-four hours, he’s going to have to try to toilet train the kid.

He’s starting to face the very real possibility that they’re not going to get out of here in time. That whoever’s behind this has helped Eli cover his tracks well enough that, although Sheriff Stilinski and Chris Argent might track them down eventually, it’s not going to be soon enough. The spell has been accelerating every night. He’s been down in this basement for four days – Jesus, it’s been four days – and Stiles has gone from fifteen to five. One more night really might do it. He’ll either be an infant, or gone entirely.

“Shit,” he says under his breath.

Eli comes downstairs about half an hour later with some dry toast for them. Jackson’s not feeling picky, and he practically inhales it. Stiles starts to whine about how he doesn’t like wheat toast plain and he wants jelly. Eli tells him to shut up. Jackson reminds him that his father will be really proud of him if he’s brave while in custody.

“This is really adorable,” Eli says, folding his arms across his chest. “Who would have guessed you would have been good with kids?”

“Anyone who’s ever seen me with kids,” Jackson retorts. “I’m _great_ with kids, asshole.”

“So I see,” Eli says, amused. “Well, I appreciate it. His wailing earlier was getting on everyone’s nerves.”

“Oh, gee, I’m really sorry that the kid you kidnapped wasn’t being stoic enough for you,” Jackson says. “Get that slop away from my dog.”

Eli ignores him, putting the bowl of unappealing wet food down in front of Wilma, who chows down. “You know this is your last chance, right? Tomorrow Stilinski will be dead, and the real fun will begin. If you haven’t joined me by that point, you’ll be dead.”

“You just don’t fucking get it,” Jackson says. “Are you this persistent with women that turn you down? You must be a real hit on OK Cupid. I hate assholes like that.”

“Funny, given that you are one,” Eli says. He sees the look on Jackson’s face. “Oh, yes. I know what you did. Sebastian Stone kept detailed notes of how his little protégé fared. That’s how I know how powerful you are – how powerful you _would_ have been, if you weren’t insisting on licking Deaton’s boots. And I know what you did to your pretty little redhead.”

Jackson snarls at him. “Yeah, well, what you apparently don’t know about is the group I started on my college campus to make sure girls get home safely from frat parties. What you don’t know about is the fact that I go to those parties and make sure any girl too drunk to say no goes home by herself. What you don’t know is that I’m going to spend the rest of my God damned life trying to make up for a fucked up decision I made when I was seventeen and high out of my mind on black magic and it _still_ won’t ever undo what I did that day or make it better. What you can’t figure out is that I’m _never_ going to be that guy again. I don’t know how one guy can be that stupid.”

“Maybe I just thought you deserved better,” Eli says. “Someone with your potential could do amazing things. You shouldn’t die in a basement for loyalty that you have no reason to have.”

“Yeah, well, if I die here, I’ll have to be happy with that, because I’d rather lick Deaton’s boots than kiss your ass, and we all know I’d only be trading one master for another.”

“Have it your way,” Eli says, and heads up the stairs.

Stiles is watching Jackson with wide eyes. “That was so cool,” he says. “You were like a superhero!”

“Sure, kid,” Jackson says. He looks at Stiles’ hopeful gaze and sighs. “Hey, how about we play a game? Pass the time, you know? Until your dad gets here.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Can I feed my crusts to Wilma? I don’t like the crusts.”

“Yeah, have at,” Jackson says.

They pass the time as best they can. Stiles is fussy and fidgety, although Jackson doesn’t really blame him. He’s a five year old chained up in a basement, who would be okay with that? So he tells Stiles stories and they play games and sometimes Stiles sings songs his mother taught him and it’s horrifying.

He’s a smart little brat, and he keeps asking questions about their current situation, about who Eli is and why he’s angry and why he decided to pick on the two of them. Jackson winds up telling him mostly modified truths. He tells Stiles about the legendary Boy in Red and says he’s a friend of Sheriff Stilinski’s. He tells him about werewolves and warlocks and explains why Eli’s angry.

“You said the doctor took his magic away?” Stiles asks. “But he got it back?”

“Yeah. He made a deal.”

Stiles chews on his lip. “Could you do that? And get yours back?”

Jackson scoffs. “I _could_. But I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a really dumb thing to do,” Jackson says. “You have to give them a part of yourself and then they can fu – mess with you whenever they feel like it.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, and then asks a different question. Jackson keeps coming back to it, though, keeps circling back to the idea whenever Stiles has gone quiet for a little while. _Could_ he?

He’s always wanted his magic back; he’s not going to lie about that. He doesn’t want it from Eli, won’t bow to the warlock’s demands, but if there was another way, shouldn’t he take it? Deaton has told him how dangerous demons are. He knows that it’s a bad idea. But then again, so is rotting in this basement.

He has faith that the others will find them – eventually. But he’s not sure he wants to wait until eventually comes. Stiles isn’t going to last more than one more day. They need help _now_. If he had his magic, he could waltz out of this basement as easy as breathing.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says to himself, while Stiles takes an afternoon nap. “I don’t have what I would need.”

Doesn’t he, though?

He has a picture of his family in his shirt pocket, and that’s something that would be a powerful totem. Not only does he love his family, but he’s used that specific photograph as a focus for himself for over a year now. It’s saturated in his magic.

He knows the spell, too. He learned it from Sebastian Stone years ago, and has drawn and redrawn it so he never forgets it, drawing it in the steam after his shower and then wiping it out, drawing it in the dirt in the forest and then rubbing it away, drawing it in the little book of spells he’s been collecting. It’s not something he would forget. It opens the door to the other plane, and then a demon comes through, attracted by your power. There’s no way to predict what demon will come. Some of them are relatively benign, some of them are the worst kind of evil imaginable.

“No way at all?” Jackson asked at the time.

Stone gave him a wry smile that he didn’t understand until later, until he found out that Stone was planning to do this himself. “You pays your money, you takes your chances.”

He starts to shake with it. He could have his power back. He’s dreamed of it for years. He would use it the right way this time, though. He would follow all of Deaton’s rules. But his power. His. Not borrowing from Deaton or scraping together what little he can that leaks through the binding, but his power.

Eli comes downstairs to give them each a sandwich and an orange for dinner. Stiles is tired and cranky and starts to cry again because he doesn’t like mustard. Eli tells him to eat it and shut the hell up. Jackson coaxes him into taking the sandwich apart and eating as much of it as he can.

It’s a bad idea. A terrible idea. It’s his _only_ idea.

“What do you think, girl?” he asks Wilma, who’s settled in the corner, watching him. She cocks her head to one side and then strains as far as she can, managing to lick his ankle. “You’d take care of me, right? You’d make sure I was okay.”

The sun has set. Stiles is asleep again. Within the next few hours, he’ll either be an infant, or he’ll be dead.

Jackson lets out a breath.

“Okay,” he says to Wilma. “Let’s roll the dice.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really enjoyed this chapter. ^_^

 

The first thing Jackson needs is some way to draw the spell. The floor is concrete, so that’s easy enough. He checks quickly on Stiles and finds that he’s sound asleep. He doesn’t have a pen, of course, and he’s debating how gross it would be to try to bite through his lip and do it in his own blood. He has a suspicion that doing that would make the spell more powerful, but it seems risky.

He’s still debating that when his gaze lands on Stiles’ discarded sandwich and all the mustard that he had scraped off of it.

“Great,” he says, retrieving it. “I’m summoning a demon . . . with mustard. Stone would be so proud of me.”

“You might think an idea is stupid,” Jackson’s father had told him once, “but if it works, it isn’t stupid.”

He puts the photograph on the floor about a foot away, dips his finger in the mustard, and draws a circle around it. It would be better to put himself in the circle, too, but impossible due to the way he’s chained to the radiator. He’ll have to make do. Once the circle is closed, he draws the symbols around it, symbols for seeking, for power, for bargaining.

When he’s finished, he takes a long look at it and then sits back. He lets out a breath. “Okay,” he says, gaze flicking over to Stiles again. “Okay.”

He draws in his focus, concentrates on the symbols. He remembers Danny laughing after one of their ‘training’ sessions, saying it reminded him of a yoga class that he had taken once. But it _is_ something like yoga – not the watered down bullshit that people practiced in America, but _real_ yoga, the kind that let people see with their eyes closed and bend their bodies into impossible shapes and walk over hot coals. It’s all about focus.

He sits there for a long time, gathering his concentration, letting the rest of the world become faint and distant. There’s no room for emotions here. Getting distracted by the urgency of their situation, by the fear of failure, is a recipe for disaster. The only thing that matters now is the spell.

There isn’t much power he can use. The binding keeps him from accessing about ninety-eight percent of what Deaton calls his inner wellspring. But two percent will be enough. It will be enough because he _believes_ it will be enough, because he isn’t about to die in a basement with a baby Stiles, not when he has a younger sister to look out for, a three-legged dog to protect. Not when he still hasn’t apologized to Lydia.

And he believes it will work for another reason, too. Because Stone recruited him; Stone thought he had power, enough to write it down for other people to see. Stone didn’t fuck around. If Jackson hadn’t been suitable, he would have chosen somebody else. Maybe Eli was right. Maybe Jackson would one day have the power to rival them all. Or maybe Eli was just talking out his ass.

Either way, Jackson thinks, he has enough power for this.

He gathers it all together and sends it through the spell in a burst, a call into the ether for anyone to hear, a door that he pushes with all his strength, enough to crack it open.

Stone never talked much about what would happen once the spell was done, so Jackson had sort of imagined hanging out and waiting for someone to respond, sort of like making a call and waiting for the person at the other end to answer. But it’s practically instantaneous. He’s no sooner felt the rush of power leave his body than he can sense another presence in the room. He can’t see or hear anything, but he knows it’s there; he can feel it. Stiles stirs a little in his sleep, like he can feel it too.

Then there’s a ripple in the air and someone – some _thing_ – approximately the shape and size of a human body but completely transparent, visible only around the borders, kneels down across the circle from him. Jackson feels the rush of power that accompanies it and immediately starts to shiver. The temperature in the basement plummets almost twenty degrees.

It’s a cold power, but a clean one. He’s met other demons, if only briefly, and gotten used to a pervasive stench around them, the smell of rot and decay. This isn’t like that. It’s the smell of a crisp winter morning, a paralyzing sort of chill, but it isn’t dirty. For a roll of the dice, he could have done a lot worse.

The spirit isn’t saying anything, is just regarding him in silence, but Jackson remembers suddenly how the next part goes. Names. He needs to give the demon his name. He takes a deep breath and steadies out his voice. “My name is Jackson Michael Whittemore.”

There’s another moment of silence, and then the demon’s voice hits his inner ear. It’s all in his head, completely inaudible to anybody else who could have been listening, and he could never describe it in words. It’s neither masculine nor feminine, neither loud nor soft. It’s not really a voice at all, but a thought, directed at him, and more than anything it reminds him of being outside during a snowstorm, with the wind whipping at his ears.

 _/ Jackson. Michael. Whittemore. /_ The demon contemplates this for a moment as Jackson shudders and tries to regain control of himself. _/ I am Marzanna. /_

Jackson has to swallow before he can speak again. “I have made you an offering.”

 _/ Indeed. A powerful totem at that. /_ A ripple of cold air and then the photograph disappears. _/ And what do you require of me in return? /_

“I need my magic unbound,” Jackson says. “I need to get out of this place.”

Another sharp, short burst of staticky wind in his ears. _/ You believe yourself worthy of a contract with me? /_

“Look,” Jackson says, losing his patience, “I sure as hell didn’t do it so I could have a chat with someone as charming as you, so yeah, let’s do the fucking contract because I’ve been in this basement for days and all I want at this point is a slice of pizza and a God damned shower!”

Laughter hisses in his mind, but he gets the feeling that the demon is genuinely amused. He supposes most people are a little more respectful when they call up a creature who could eat them for lunch, but that’s never really been his style.

 _/ Done, /_ the voice says, and the ripple of translucent air rushes towards him. A moment later he’s blanketed in cold so vicious that he can’t even move. He feels like he’s been frozen solid. It courses through his veins as if he had been injected with ice water. But then he feels something loosen and come free inside him. The cold slides away, leaving him shivering but able to move, and –

He snaps his fingers. Sparks appear at the end of them. His power. He gives a laugh that’s half hysterical, and his gaze darts around the basement. What should he use it for first? His options are practically endless. Magic was all about possibilities. He could do anything.

From the corner, he hears a quiet whine, and then he grins at Wilma and gives a short gesture in her direction. Her leash comes untied from the banister and slides to the floor. A moment later, he’s overwhelmed by sixty pounds of happy canine. “Hey, girl,” he says, as she slobbers all over his face. “Yeah, I missed you too,” he says, wrapping an arm around her neck and patting awkwardly at her side.

Once he’s done with that and Wilma is settled down, happily licking the remnants of mustard off the floor, he says, “The first thing I need to do is know what I’m dealing with.”

 _/ What do you require of me? /_ Marzanna asks.

“Nothing,” Jackson says, rolling his eyes. “Just stay over there in your corner. I can handle this.”

He closes his eyes and expands his consciousness. It’s one of the first things Stone had taught him. Being aware of one’s surroundings is important for a variety of reasons. There are plenty of spells to enhance the senses. None of them are difficult. This one focuses on hearing, but also a kind of extra-sensory perception, that allows him to simply _know_ what’s going on around him without having to see it.

There are four hunters in the house. Eli is one of them, but he’s asleep, as is one of the others. There are two awake, one watching the front and one watching the back. There are a lot of guns and enough explosives to bring down a small army. Beyond that, there’s a magical shield around the entire house. Not the kind that would simply keep them from being detected; it’s more of an illusion. Powerful and strong enough that he doubts even Deaton would see through it.

 _/ There is another demon in this house, /_ Marzanna comments.

“Yeah, Eli’s got one on tap,” Jackson grunts. If they could get out without waking Eli, they’d be fine. He could take care of the others, no problem. They probably have protection spells, but he could drop walls on them, knock them over with a gust of wind, something like that. He could make their guns jam or explode in their faces. All that would be easy. But if Eli wakes up and brings his demon into the picture, it’ll be a crap shoot.

So as much as he might take joy in bringing the house down around their ears, it’s probably not a good idea. They’ll have to sneak out. He should be able to keep the other two hunters from noticing them. He leans over and shakes Stiles’ shoulder. The other boy blinks up at him. Jackson is just about to say something when his face screws up and he begins to cry.

“Hey, hey, buddy, it’s me,” Jackson says, but Stiles’ howls only intensify. He’s not even crying in words like he was the previous –

The previous day. Jackson swears. He doesn’t have his watch, doesn’t know how much time has passed, but apparently it was enough for the spell to have another go around at Stiles. He’s a toddler now, maybe even an infant.

“Jesus, Stiles,” Jackson says, and at that moment someone bangs on the basement door and shouts, “Shut that kid up!”

Jackson snarls at the door, but if they wake Eli for help, he’ll really be screwed. So he lowers his voice, keeps it calm and even. “Hey, Stiles, don’t cry, okay? You’re gonna be okay, everything’s okay.” It doesn’t seem to be helping. Jackson grits his teeth. “You’d better never tell anyone about this, asshole, I hope you don’t even remember it later,” he mutters, and then starts to sing. Singing always calms Tanya right down. His mother sang to him when he was a baby. He pulls Stiles against his shoulder and rocks him back and forth. “Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high . . .”

Stiles’ sobs gradually fade into sniffles, and Jackson rocks him back to sleep. Jackson sighs and rethinks. He’s not going to be able to go _anywhere_ with a twenty-year-old infant in tow. He’d be lucky if he made it up the stairs.

 _/ We could silence him, /_ Marzanna suggests.

“Keep your opinions to yourself unless I ask for them,” Jackson says. Yes, they could make Stiles be quiet, or keep the others from hearing them, but if he’s focusing on that, he won’t be as focused on all the other things he needs to do. “Can we fix him?”

 _/ Mm. /_ Marzanna falls silent, but Jackson gets the impression that the demon is still there, reaching out through him to further examine Stiles. _/ It might be possible, but it would be risky. The magic is complex. Did you know he isn’t alone in his head? /_

“What? No,” Jackson says, frowning. “What does that mean?”

_/ Exactly what I said. There’s someone else in his head. A shade, I believe. /_

Jackson thinks it over, considers everything that had happened over the past year. “Well, it’s gotta be Peter Hale,” he says. “Can we use that?”

 _/ He’s currently imprisoned by the fact that Stiles doesn’t not recall his presence, /_ Marzanna says. _/ It would be possible to draw him to the surface, but it would be difficult to maintain. /_

“Forget it, then,” Jackson says, still scowling. He can’t take Stiles with him, and he doesn’t dare leave him there. If Eli finds Jackson gone, he’ll almost certainly slit Stiles’ throat and be done with it, and hope that being an infant will be good enough to keep him from passing along his power.

His gaze falls on the half-windows at the top of the walls. They’re too small for him to get through, but . . .

It takes only a moment to free himself from the radiator and get to his feet. The window isn’t locked, and he opens it easily. He kneels back down and cups Wilma’s face in his hands. “Okay, girl,” he says. “I need you to go to Deaton, okay? Go find Deaton, and bring him here to me.”

Wilma licks his cheek. Jackson takes that as a yes. He lifts her up and helps her squirm through the window. She turns around and touches her nose to his before loping off into the darkness.

Jackson sighs and slumps back to the floor. “Okay, so the cavalry is on its way,” he says. “Now all we have to do is figure out what to do when they get here. There’s some sort of magical shield around this place, right?”

_/ Indeed. /_

“Okay, so first we’re gonna need to break that down. After that . . .” Jackson thinks over everything he knows about Eli, about the way he’s been grandstanding and monologuing. It won’t be enough for him to quietly murder Stiles in this basement. Once he realizes the others have arrived, he’ll want to make a big production out of it. That’ll give them an opening; hell, it’ll give them ten openings if they play their cards right. His gaze lands on Stiles’ sleeping body speculatively. “Okay,” he finally says. “I have an idea. But I think I’m going to need your help.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It’s nearly one AM and Derek is on his fourth cup of coffee when there’s a knock on the door to Sheriff Stilinski’s office. The pack has been taking it in shifts, checking out every house they can find with even the remotest connection to the hunters, coordinating between Tom and Chris and Deaton. It’s been a hellishly long day, and he’s doing it on only a few hours of sleep. The coffee at the station is burnt crap, but he’s beyond caring.

“What is it,” he says roughly, pushing a hand through his hair.

Scott comes in. His jaw is set in the stubborn expression that Derek really, really hates to see on him. “Look, I won’t try to tell you that you should try to sleep _or_ remind you that you’re recovering from wolfsbane poisoning – ”

“Like you just did?” Derek growls.

“But I _will_ say that you need to eat. You’re healing right now, and you must be starving, and yes I know that you’re busy, but Erica and Danny just went and picked up some sandwich stuff from that all-night Wal-Mart, and you need to come eat something.”

Derek sighs and slaps the folder down. It’s not like he’s making any progress, so what the hell does it matter? He pushes his way out into the main room of the police station. It’s practically deserted; there are still a few officers on shift, but they’re giving the pack a wide berth. It’s not that Derek hasn’t eaten all day – he’s pretty sure he ate an entire pizza sometime that afternoon – but Scott is right. Healing uses up a lot of energy. As soon as he sees the sandwich material, he groans.

Erica holds out a plate to him. “Turkey, cheddar, even put the tomato between the lettuce and the turkey so it wouldn’t get the bread soggy just like your anal retentive ass likes.”

“Thanks,” Derek says, his mouth already full.

Scott starts making a sandwich, too, but a few moments later, his phone rings. He puts down what he’s doing and glances at it. “Deaton,” he says, and answers, putting it on speaker. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Well,” Deaton says, his voice reserved as ever, “Wilma just showed up at my clinic.”

Derek nearly chokes on a wad of bread. “Is Jackson with her?”

“No,” Deaton says. “She seems very distraught. When I tried to ask her about him, she keeps trotting a few steps away, then stopping and waiting.”

“She wants to lead you to him,” Scott says, and slams a second piece of bread down on his sandwich even though so far it’s only a pile of roast beef. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Derek is already halfway out the door, and it takes far longer than he would like to organize everybody. They drop everything they’re doing and head for the cars, but they aren’t all there at the station; some people need to be called, Chris needs to be notified, and so does the sheriff. They get it all sorted out quickly, all things considered, but still a lot more slowly than Derek would like.

Wilma clearly shares his sentiment. When they get to the clinic, she’s standing outside, jogging back and forth impatiently. Deaton is trying to coax her into drinking some water. She takes a slurp occasionally but seems largely uninterested. “Let’s go,” Derek says, while the others are still piling up in cars.

Deaton nods and says to Wilma, “Okay, Wilma. Take us to Jackson.”

Wilma takes off like a shot, and Derek shifts and leaps after her without waiting for anything mundane like a vehicle. Scott and Erica are running with him, although the others opt to take the cars. Wilma is fast, but it’s no trouble keeping up with her. She doesn’t stop to glance over her shoulder once, doesn’t even slow down until she skids to a halt right outside a modest two-story house on the outskirts of town.

“Didn’t we check this place?” Danny asks, jumping out of Deaton’s car before it comes to a complete stop. The sheriff’s cruiser had caught up with them a few minutes earlier. Wilma licks Danny’s hand and then jogs around the house and out of sight.

Scott nods, shifting back to his human form. “I think it was one in the second batch. They let us come in and look around and everything.”

“Because they weren’t here yet then,” Boyd says. “It was before they moved. And what better way to defer suspicion than to let us take a look?”

“Shitheads,” Erica snarls.

Allison gets out of Lydia’s car as it pulls to a halt down the road. “Dad says he’s about five minutes out,” he reports. “I was texting him our crossroads as we went. How should we handle this?”

Deaton looks the house over. “I still can’t feel any sort of – ” he begins, but just then there’s a sound that’s not quite a sound, a sharp hiss of static and a blast of icy cold air and it’s like the house in front of them is suddenly _different_ in a completely indefinable sort of way. Deaton sucks in a sharp breath and mutters something in another language under his breath.

“What just happened?” Derek demands. He’s shifted back, but is staying in his partial form.

“There was a ward up around the house and it just shattered into pieces,” Deaton says.

“What? How? Do they know we’re here?” multiple voice clamor.

“No,” Deaton says slowly. “I think it was – ”

Wilma jogs back around the house, now looking quite pleased with herself, tongue lolling.

“Jackson,” Deaton finishes.

“Whatever it was, it wasn’t subtle,” Tom says, taking his gun out of its holster. “We need to get them out and we need to do it now. I’ll take the back; Allison, you take the front. The rest of you split about half and half, but _be careful_ , we already know there are hunters in this house.”

They’ve no sooner arranged themselves into two rough groups when there’s a spate of sudden gunfire. Derek is behind Tom and jumps on him, taking him into a roll and behind the low stone wall at the edge of the backyard. One of the bullets clips his shoulder, but it’s a flesh wound and he can already feel it closing. “You okay?” he asks Tom.

“Yeah, Christ, let me – ” Tom grabs at his radio.

“Don’t bother,” Deaton says, where he’s crouched low behind him. The other wolves have scattered for cover, and Derek is betting that everyone at the front of the house had to do so as well. “He’s tossed up another barrier. Nobody will hear the shots and call 911. We’ll just have to deal with this ourselves.”

“Great,” Tom mutters.

Derek gives their surroundings a quick glance. The back of the house borders on forest, although not on the preserve. It’s sparse, with a gentle slope upward, and won’t offer them very much cover. The shooter is on a balcony on the second floor, and there’s no way they’re going to be able to get to him before he manages to shoot them down. It’s a tactical nightmare, but they do have one advantage; the hunters are using regular steel bullets. “If I draw him out, can you take him down?” he asks Tom.

Tom peeks over the stone wall and then gestures with his gun. “Watch me.”

Derek nods and mentally prepares himself for exactly how much this is going to hurt. Then he jumps over the wall and leaps for the door. Two bullets take him right in the chest, and he’s knocked backwards and into the dirt. Then he hears a shot from behind him and the man on the balcony loses his balance and topples over. Derek recovers enough to spring forward and knock him down as he tries to scramble to his feet.

There are no more shots from their end of the house, and he sees Erica and Isaac both leap over the stone wall, clearly prepared to barge in through the back door and find Stiles. But before they can, Eli comes out the back door, dragging Stiles with him. Derek goes immediately tense. Stiles isn’t struggling or trying to get away; instead he’s just wailing at the top of his lungs, sobbing and screaming.

“Jesus,” Erica says, from a few feet back. Derek stumbles upwards but there’s a huge wall of force that slams him, all of them, backwards. He fetches up against a tree and lands hard, barely able to breathe.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you’re just in time!” Eli declares, his voice a high-pitched combination of bravado and defiance. Derek shakes his head and looks up to see that he’s tossed a circle of mountain ash around himself. He’s got Stiles in front of him now, and a silver knife pressed into his throat. Stiles is still just crying, the noise of distress and confusion that only babies make.

“I was going to give it one more day,” Eli says, as the wolves manage to get back to their feet and try to figure out what to do. “But I think he’s probably far back enough now that it won’t make any difference. Even if he does manage to pass the alpha power along to one of you, well, at least you’ve conveniently gathered yourselves here for me.”

“Eli, don’t do this.” It’s Chris who speaks, coming around the house with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The gunfire from the front of the house has now ceased as well. “You know as well as I do that you’re crossing lines you can’t un-cross.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” Eli says. “I’ve gotten exactly what I want. Weeks of pain and suffering for the people who took everything from me. I know I won’t live through this. I’ll slit this boy’s throat and then you’ll put me down. I can’t stop you. But you can’t stop me, either.” His voice is gaining in volume, becoming a true rant. “You can shoot me if you want, but before I die I’ll put my knife in his throat, and none of you can cross this line of ash, so it doesn’t matter what you do to me afterwards, because nobody, _nobody_ can stop me now!”

Stiles looks up, and his eyes flash in a sudden, brilliant burst of blue.

“What – ” Chris starts to say to Eli, and then Peter/Stiles grabs Eli by the wrist and forces the knife away from his throat. He doesn’t gain a lot of space, but it’s a little, enough to push himself forwards and twist around, digging his thumb into the web of Eli’s hand and breaking his grip on the knife. Eli makes a strangled noise of pain and Peter ducks underneath his arm, twisting him around.

They’re still too close to risk a shot, and Derek can’t cross the circle, but that doesn’t matter to Sheriff Stilinski. He throws himself across the backyard and onto Eli, knocking all of them to the ground. Peter manages to wrestle free and take Stiles’ body into a controlled tumble, and Derek flings himself forward and crouches over his body protectively.

“Hello, nephew,” Peter says, wheezing slightly from the exertion, and Derek growls at him.

There’s another huge burst of force and Tom is knocked backwards and off of Eli with what would be bone-breaking force. Half the pack leaps forward to break his fall, and he winds up knocking over about six different wolves on his way to the ground.

Eli scrambles to his feet but Deaton is ready for him now. He tosses out a handful of mountain ash that settles in a neat circle around the two of them, points a finger forward, and shouts several words in a language that none of them recognize. Eli screams, his body bowing and going taut, mouth wide open as streams of ultraviolet light come out, showers of sparks falling to the ground around him.

“What the _hell_ ,” Tom pants.

Deaton goes to one knee, and Scott grabs him before he can fall. “I banished his demon,” Deaton says hoarsely. “He can’t use magic anymore.”

Eli stares at him, then looks down at his hands. He makes a gesture, obviously expecting another wall of force. “No,” he shouts. “No!”

The back door opens again and Jackson walks out. Wilma trots up and immediately goes nuts, jumping up onto him and licking his face. “Get down, you weirdo,” Jackson says, shoving at her ineffectually. “Party over? Thank God. I need, like, the biggest fucking cheeseburger and I’d also accept an apology for getting caught up in your fucking disaster.”

“Jackson,” Deaton says quietly. “Who is that?”

“Who’s who?” Danny asks, looking his friend over.

Chris has walked over to Eli and is pulling an arm around his back, taking out a pair of handcuffs. He’s also looking hard at Jackson. “He broke the spell around the house. That means he has his magic back.”

“Hey, Eli made a deal, so I made a deal,” Jackson says. “You pays your money, you takes your chances. You’re welcome.”

Deaton gives a little shudder, obviously recognizing the phrase. “Jackson,” he says again, but he’s cut off when Stiles’ body shudders underneath Derek’s.

“Can’t – can’t hold it – ” Peter says to Derek. “Sorry – ” he adds, and then Stiles’ face screws up and he starts to cry again. Tom hurries over and gathers Stiles into his arms, rocking him back and forth as he sobs. Stiles takes a look at Derek, who has blood all over his shirt from the bullets he took, his fangs and glowing blue eyes, and starts to cry even harder. Derek flinches away as if he had been slapped.

He walks over to where Chris has forced Eli to his knees and yanks him up by the collar. “Fix him,” he growls, giving the man a rough shake.

Eli gives a wheezing noise that’s part pain, part laughter. “No.”

Derek’s growl intensifies, going lower in his throat. “ _Fix him_.”

“You can’t make me,” Eli pants, “and I won’t do it. Kill me if you want. It won’t matter. There’s no way to restore his memories if I won’t do it. Have fun trying to maintain your territory with _that_ as your alpha.” Another wheezing laugh as Stiles gives a little whimper and burrows into his father’s arms. “What are you going to do, Hale? Torture me? Do you want _that_ to be the first impression you make on your child-lupa? He’s already afraid of you. Look at him.”

Derek can’t, he won’t. He feels rage and despair warring in his gut, in his throat. His hand loosens on Eli’s collar and lets go.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Jackson snaps. He marches over and grabs Eli by the chin, yanking him around so they’re facing. Jackson’s eyes have gone entirely white. “Listen to me, you gutless, nutless son of a bitch. You’re going to go fix Stiles. You’re going to take your magic out of him – _all_ of it this time. You’re going to do it right fucking now. Do you understand me?” He gives Eli one final shake and then lets him go.

Eli’s eyes are white now, too. Deaton takes a step forward like he’s going to say or do something, but then Eli walks over to Stiles like he’s in a dream. Stiles flinches away, but Eli takes him by the arm, pressing his palm against the inside of his forearm where his original spell had been done. He begins to chant in an undertone. Stiles goes rigid in his arms, eyes open wide but staring up at nothing.

It only takes a minute before Eli lets him go and gets to his feet, still moving slowly. Stiles blinks a few times and shakes himself. He looks up and then around. Derek realizes that he’s holding his breath, that his knees feel like they’re going to give at any moment.

“Dad?” Stiles’ voice is hoarse, but clear. “What – what’s going on?” He reaches up and rubs a hand over his face. “Where am – Derek? Where’s Derek?”

The air rushes out of Derek and he goes to his knees beside Stiles. “I’m here,” he says.

“My head aches like crazy,” Stiles mutters, and he closes his eyes. Derek grabs his hand and grips it tightly. Stiles squeezes back just as hard.

Deaton gives a little sigh. “Jackson,” he says, tone gentle, but wary.

“I’m not done,” Jackson says, not even looking at his teacher. He walks back over to Eli. “Now you’re going to tell us who put you up to this.”

Eli opens his mouth, but then there’s a sharp _crack_. It’s not overly loud, but it’s unmistakable. Eli collapses backwards with a bullet in his heart, dead before he hits the ground. Several of the wolves take off in the direction that the gunshot came from, but Derek doubts they’ll find anyone. At the moment, he doesn’t even care. Stiles is back, and that’s all that matters.

The rest of the gathering clearly doesn’t feel the same way. There’s a predictable riot of chaos as everyone tries to figure out what just happened. Chris comes back into the backyard a few minutes later to report that whoever the shooter was, he’s long gone. “He must have set up for that shot and had a quick escape plotted,” he says. “Not that I have any idea why.”

“S’obvious, isn’t it,” Stiles slurs out, eyes closed. “Eli was about to reveal who the Big Bad was. But you have to be at least a Level 4 hero to unlock that information.”

“Okay, kiddo, we need to take you home,” Tom says. “Chris, can you take care of the – ” He gestures vaguely to the house and the hunters that they’ve taken out of commission, and the other man nods. “Thanks. Jackson, your parents are worried sick, we need to get you home, too. Danny, could you – ”

Deaton clears his throat. “I can’t allow that, actually.”

Everyone looks over at him. Jackson folds his arms over his chest and rolls his eyes. “I’m not going to suddenly turn evil,” he says. “I did what I had to do to get the fuck out of there, and to take that jerk out of commission. I’m sorry if you don’t approve, but I wasn’t going to wait around for him to kill us. You guys had plenty of time to rescue me.”

“He’s right,” Tom says, shaking his head. “We wouldn’t have been in time if Jackson hadn’t gotten Wilma out to lead us.”

“I agree, but that isn’t actually the point,” Deaton says. “I don’t have an objection to Jackson’s magic being unbound per se. I have a problem with the demon he’s now got sitting on his shoulder.”

“Marzanna’s pretty chill, actually,” Jackson says. “Literally.”

Stiles starts to snigger despite himself.

“Be that as it may,” Deaton says evenly, “it’s a little disconcerting that the first thing you did after regaining yours powers was invade a man’s mind and bend it to your will.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Stiles looks up at this, pulling out of his father’s arms. He’s shaky, but vertical. Derek gets an arm around his waist to support him. “The first thing he did after regaining his powers was protect me. Stay with me. He had more than enough power to get out of that basement and go fuck up whatever he wanted to. Or to get out of that basement and kill everyone on his way. But he chose to send Wilma to get you, and stay with me, to make sure I was all right. He brought Peter to the surface so he could be sure that I would survive whatever rescue attempt you guys mounted.” He looks at Jackson and gives him a nod. “I’m fine with what he’s done and with the power he’s gained. Maybe he crossed a line, but he did it to save my life.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Deaton remarks.

Stiles gives a weary, crooked smile. “Then I guess we’ll all see each other there.”

Tom sighs and pushes his hands through his hair. “Look, Alan, I appreciate your concerns, and I’m all about discussing your concerns and the consequences. Tomorrow. Right now, everyone needs some food and some sleep, and Jackson’s parents need to know that he’s all right.”

“All right,” Deaton says. Somewhat awkwardly, he says to Jackson, “It’s not that I’m angry. I just – ”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jackson says, scowling and flushing pink. “You’re worried, I get it, let’s save the sap for a time I’ll actually want it, like never.”

Tom frowns a little and says, “Actually, before I take you home, I _would_ like to know why you had a book of Sebastian Stone’s spells in your trunk.”

Jackson shrugs. “He was a sociopath, but he was a fucking genius. Why should I let that go to waste? Just because it was invented for one purpose doesn’t mean it can’t be used for another.”

“Fair enough,” Tom says. “You get on home, son.”

Jackson nods. Wilma trots over and gives Stiles a sloppy kiss. He scratches behind her ears. Danny gives Stiles a prolonged hug before grabbing Lydia’s keys and leaving to take Jackson home. Derek turns to say something to Stiles and realizes that his eyes are closed, that he’s half asleep. “So Jackson summoned Peter?” he asks.

Stiles nods. “Yeah, he couldn’t hold it for long outside of a circle, but . . .” The words are lost in a huge yawn. “There’s a lot we’re going to have to talk about. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Tom agrees firmly. “C’mon, kiddo. Let’s get you back to the den.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now: puppy piles and exposition!
> 
> Stay tuned on [my tumblr](http://gingersnapwolves.tumblr.com) for updates as to when the next installment will be out!

 

The entire pack winds up back at the den within the next hour. Allison stays at the house with Lydia to help her father with some of the cleanup; Isaac and Boyd run back to the station to gather up the food they had brought, since Stiles’ stomach is grumbling. They sit around and eat until everyone is back, including Danny. Stiles is spending some quality time in Derek's lap, typing on his laptop, saying he wants to look a few things up. He doesn’t tell anyone what.

“How’d his parents take it?” Scott asks Danny when he comes into the kitchen.

“They’re so glad to see him that I don’t think they really care about the magic stuff yet,” Danny says, settling in to make himself a sandwich.

Stiles nearly chokes on his sandwich. “You told Jackson’s parents?”

“We kind of had to when he disappeared like that,” Danny says, with a shrug. “C’mon, Stiles, they would have wound up clued in eventually.”

“I guess,” Stiles says, shaking his head. “Ah, whatever. I can’t hate the jackass anymore. He was way more patient with five-year-old me than I would have been.”

The others all exchange glances and take a few minutes chewing on their sandwiches before Scott says, “So, you remember everything that happened?”

Stiles nods. “Yeah. It feels kind of weird and disjointed but I’m pretty sure I’ve got it all. You guys were all pretty patient with me, for that matter.” He digs his thumb into Derek’s ribs. “Especially you. Sorry I forgot about you, sour wolf.”

Derek growls at him, but overall he seems quite relaxed.

“Seriously, though,” Stiles says, “we’re going to have a lot to talk about tomorrow.” He yawns and stretches. “But for now, I’m going to get some sleep and I expect to be cuddled.”

“We are all over that,” Erica says, getting to her feet. Ten minutes later they’re asleep in a pile in the bedroom. Stiles rests his head against a wolf flank, scratches behind Derek’s ears, and promptly passes out.

He finds himself standing in the birch grove. Peter is lounging against one of the trees, as is his wont. “Thanks for the assist,” Stiles greets him, plopping down next to him.

Peter smirks at him. “It was fun to get a chance in the driver’s seat,” he says. “Your friend Jackson is quite the sorcerer now.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, and shrugs. “Whatever. I can’t say he’s ever going to be my best buddy, but I can hardly argue with him saving my ass.”

Peter nods. “I assume that you agree that this incident is part of the larger pattern.”

“Yep.”

“And you’re finally going to take my advice and tell the rest of the pack about it.”

Stiles scowls at him. “It’s not like I ever said your advice was bad. I admitted you were right. I just, you know, didn’t actually want to do it. But yeah. It’s gone too far to be ignored now. But on the upside, I think I finally have an idea about who’s behind this.”

“Well, by all means,” Peter says, “let me hear it.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Stiles wakes up knowing that someone’s watching him. Several someones. Practically everyone. Without opening his eyes, he says, “I remember everything.”

There’s an audible sigh of relief from every corner of the room. He sits up and rubs a hand over his face, waking himself up. Derek is curled up in his wolf form, and when Stiles sits up, he pushes his face into Stiles’ lap, growling and demanding attention. Stiles snorts with laughter and scratches behind his ears.

“Busy day today,” he says, rubbing both hands over his head and leaving his hair standing in lopsided spikes.

“You really want _all_ of us at the meeting?” Isaac says, looking over.

“I do,” Stiles says. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

“That sounds ominous,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes.

Stiles shrugs. “Nothing is more or less of a disaster before all this started. And hey, we’re doing a lot better than we were yesterday. I just want to talk about some theories that I have.”

This gets him some suspicious glances, but the others leave him alone while he goes into the shower to get his thoughts in order. They don’t have a lot of time for breakfast, and of course he hasn’t been baking for days, so after some thought, Stiles texts the relevant parties and asks if they can have the morning’s meeting somewhere that he can eat. He still feels starving. Besides, maybe things will seem less dire over coffee and pancakes.

Nobody has a problem with that, and they wind up at Ernie’s Diner, a downtown café whose owner once had to deal with hexed water pipes. He gives them a table in the back, plenty of space, and four pots of coffee.

Jackson is the last to arrive, with his usual mulish look on his face. Wilma’s tail wags madly as she greets Stiles, and then Jackson slumps into a chair as far away from Deaton as possible. Danny pours him a mug of coffee and elbows him until he says hello to everyone.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “So I know what happened, basically, but I’m pretty sure that by the time I was twelve or so, you guys weren’t giving me all the details. Let’s take it from the top. Tell me everything that happened.”

It takes time. Sheriff Stilinski does most of the narrating from their end, along with occasional contributions from Chris, Derek, and Scott. Jackson glowers but tells Stiles about how he had gotten captured and everything that Eli had said to him. Stiles takes notes for most of it, but sometimes just sits with his eyes closed, deep in thought.

“So here’s the deal,” he finally says. “Obviously we are all very concerned about the fact that I nearly got wiped off the planet. And I don’t think Eli was acting alone.”

Chris grimaces. “Well, he had recruited several other hunters.”

Stiles shakes his head. “What I mean is, I think he was acting on orders. Or at least, that someone gave him this idea. I don’t think he came up with it himself.” He’s getting a few skeptical looks, and he says, “I should start at the beginning, but uh . . . this is actually something I’ve been talking to Peter about lately. About how there seems to be a pattern in these events.”

“You think someone’s targeting you?” Deaton asks.

“Yeah. Specifically, a hunter. I think it started at the Conclave. Then they sent Gabriel Khan and Ruben Gutierrez after us. Then the whole thing with Cora and Liliana Santos, and now this.”

“Those things are really only tangentially related,” Chris says. “And one could make a pretty powerful argument that what happened with Cora was a good thing.”

“That’s true,” Stiles says. “But let’s start with Ruben Gutierrez. He is a fellow that many people here met up close and personal. And a running theme I’ve heard is that he was far too stupid to come up with the plan that he did. Teaming up with Khan, using the alpha pack as a lure, framing me for Loesch’s murder? It was clever, and that guy doesn’t do clever. Arguments?”

Chris sighs and shakes his head. Nobody else argues. The pack exchanges a glance like they’re going to say something, but then stay quiet.

“At the Conclave,” Stiles says, “I kicked some major hornet nest. I already had something of a reputation, and basically proved it true – not that I was kickass, but that I don’t play by the rules, that I won’t honor all the traditions. Plus I exposed the prisons, even if it _was_ largely accidental.

“The whole thing is, what Peter and I have been talking about, is that there’s just way too much happening for it to be coincidence. Nobody’s luck is as bad as mine. The whole thing with Khan and Gutierrez, Deucalion and Jennifer Blake showing up, the Falcon getting hold of Peter’s daughter, and now this – these are events designed to try to fuck with me.”

“But they’re not connected,” Tom says, “except by you.”

Stiles presses his lips together, then says, “See, the thing is, they are. There’s one hunter who can be linked, if only peripherally, to all these events.”

“And who is that?” Chris asks, frowning.

“Jim Stoddard,” Stiles says. Chris’ frown deepens. “He was at the Conclave. I met him briefly, before I came out of the werewolf closet, and I’m pretty sure he was at my little seminar later. Then, he was one of the hunters who worked with Ruben Gutierrez to try to catch Khan. You gave me that list,” he adds to Chris. “Then there’s Liliana Santos. Yes, that was a good thing, especially for Cora. But I’m pretty sure that my response of sending out an anonymous call to arms to other hunters was not what anyone expected me to do. He probably figured that I would round up some werewolves and try to mount some sort of attack and get myself killed.”

“How is Stoddard connected to that?” Derek asks, watching Stiles carefully.

“Liliana worked with him on more than one occasion. After Chris here came in and took over the California territory, Liliana got itchy feet and wound up moving out east. She settled in New York for a few years and took some jobs with the Stoddard family. I can’t prove that one of them goaded her into setting prisoners free. But I do know that her husband said she had agreed _not_ to do it, but then suddenly she did.”

Chris lets out a breath. “Is he connected to Deucalion at all?”

“I haven’t found a connection yet. That honestly could have been a coincidence.” Stiles shrugs. “Peter has warned me about taking conspiracy theorizing too far. I can’t connect him to the Falcon, either, and I can’t directly connect him to Malia, but I can connect _Liliana_ to Malia. Malia’s biological mother is a were-coyote, and she’s one of the people that Liliana rescued from the Gutierrez’s prison.”

“So she might have mentioned having a daughter to Liliana, who might have mentioned it to Jim Stoddard, who might have figured out who the father was somehow,” Lydia says, nodding along.

“Right. Putting that aside. Now there’s Eli. Again, a man of subpar intelligence with a brilliant plan.”

“How do you figure the subpar intelligence?” Scott asks.

“Dude,” Jackson says with a snort. “If you’d met him . . .”

Stiles can’t help but smile. “Everyone knows that I have ties with my local Druid. He had to be an idiot to cast that spell on me in Oregon. I think he was honestly just arrogant enough to figure that nobody would care. Which, again. Idiot. But this, too – his plan was great, but from what you guys have told me, his execution was sloppy. You might not have found him in time, but you _would_ have found him.”

Tom nods. “He left a lot of footprints. When it came to flying under the radar, he had no idea what he was doing.”

“So,” Stiles says, “Eli was taking orders from somebody. And that somebody called and told him to move when you were getting too close.”

“That was Stella,” Chris says. “My fault.”

“But I don’t think it was,” Stiles says. “I think Stella told you the truth when she said that Eli hadn’t been in contact with her. From the way Jackson described the call, it sounds more like a call from a superior, someone who intimidated him.”

“He’s right,” Jackson says, mouth full of pancakes. “He wasn’t happy about them calling.”

“How’s Eli connected to Stoddard?” Tom asks.

“Again, peripherally. Eli’s originally from Vermont, and he worked with the Stoddards before Stella lost her Druid and recruited him.”

“Hm.” Chris pours more syrup on his pancakes. “He’s smart, to act through intermediaries that don’t have much of a connection with him. I’ll admit it’s likely enough. He’s been straddling the fence on all these issues and the way he’s been so reasonable about everything makes me nervous. The prison he showed us was a sham, it turns out. We never saw the real one.”

“Son of a bitch,” Derek mutters.

“Wait, here’s what I don’t get,” Scott says suddenly. “So your theory is that Jim Stoddard or one of his lackeys was out there last night and they killed Eli to cover their tracks, right? But then why did he wait to shoot Eli until after he had fixed you? He could have done it any time.”

“Yeah . . .” Stiles lets out a breath. “Sometimes it seems to me like . . . they’re just messing with me. It reminds me of Sebastian Stone, actually. They’re just playing games, setting up obstacles to see what I do with them. And it’s like, if I die, too bad, time to find a new toy. But they were content to let it play out until he actively had to cover his tracks.”

“Well, that’s sure as hell nothing like Jim Stoddard,” Chris says. “He can be sneaky when he needs to be, though from what I know of him he would take a straightforward route when possible. But he’s not the type of guy who would do this.”

“Yeah, and to be fair, anyone who just wanted to snipe me and have done with it could’ve done it a thousand times by now,” Stiles adds, with a shrug. Derek growls at him and Tom’s mouth tightens into a thin line. “I’m just saying! I don’t hide in my house. If that’s all they wanted, it could be done.”

“We’re assuming the sniper and the mastermind are the same person,” Boyd says.

“Occam’s Razor,” Stiles says. “It would be weird if they weren’t related somehow.”

Lydia spears a strawberry with her fork and says, “There are a hundred reasons why he might not have taken the shot until that moment. Maybe he didn’t get into position until then. Maybe his gun jammed. Maybe he had to sneeze. I mean, seriously, we can’t know why he didn’t shoot Eli until he did. We can only take an _educated_ guess that he was doing it to keep Eli from telling us who was behind the curtain.”

“So what do we do?” Danny asks.

“We stick together and we keep our eyes open,” Stiles says. “I think we’re pretty safe in San Francisco. We had almost the entire year there without incident. But this summer, any time we’re back, we’re on constant buddy rule from now on.”

“If we know who’s behind it, can’t we do something?” Erica asks.

“We don’t _know_ anything,” Stiles says. “We have tenuous connections and a unifying theory but we’re still hundreds of miles away from proof. And I happen to agree with Chris on the fact that Stoddard doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would torment me and set me up just for fun. I’m not sure of anything yet.” To Chris, he adds, “I assume you have some ideas about the whole thing with the hunter prison?”

“I have to talk to Julien and Mikael,” Chris says, shaking his head. “If the prison he showed us was faked, then the real one is probably a horror show. Maybe we can find it. But I know what you’re getting at, and no, we don’t dare confront him. Jim has too much pull. If he could convince the Winchesters or Drake or the Order of St. James to side with them or take up arms against us, we’d be screwed.”

“Okay.” Stiles sighs. “One thing at a time, I guess.”

“But what the fuck is the end goal?” Erica asks. “These guys aren’t going to give up their power. And they sure as hell aren’t going to suddenly become decent people. What are we going to do, kill them?”

“There will be a way to remove them from power,” Stiles says evenly. “We just have to find it.”

Tom shakes his head a little and then reaches out to tousle his son’s hair. “How long have you been sitting on this?”

“The theory?” Stiles shrugs. “Six months, maybe. It was just a feeling for a long time. But then I ran it past Peter, and he thought it was reasonable, so I started doing some research. You know, in my copious free time. And yes, I knew that I should tell you guys. I just didn’t want to freak anybody out, especially when I had no proof, and at the time, no suspects.”

“Well, you’re not to keep anything like that from us, ever again,” Lydia says.

Stiles holds up one hand and says, “Scout’s honor.”

Several of the pack groan.

Stiles laughs a little and says, “You know what, though? I’m not scared. Because I might be the legendary boy in red and people might spread rumors about me . . . but I have the best pack, the best family, the best friends and allies in the world. You guys saved my fucking bacon this month and I did pretty much zilch to help you out. Anyone who comes looking for trouble is going to get all the trouble they want, but if they think I’m the only one they need to watch out for, they are dead wrong.”

“True,” Scott says, nodding. “You were pretty useless this time,” he adds, and Stiles punches him in the shoulder, but everyone is laughing.

Deaton clears his throat. “I believe it’s time to address the elephant in the room,” he says. “Jackson, I’ve done some research on this . . . Marzanna. It could have been a lot worse, but a demon will always be seeking to corrupt you and steal your power. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Jackson says, “but I also know that there have been cases of sorcerers developing mutual respect with their literal demons and co-existing with them for years, so I don’t see why we need to go all Exorcist after one measly day.”

“It isn’t just that,” Deaton says. “Your magic was bound for a reason. You have a history with black magic. And while I understand that you invaded Eli’s mind to save Stiles’ life, that’s not an encouraging sign. I have to take this before the Druidic Council.”

Jackson rolls his eyes and says, “Fine, whatever you feel like you have to do.”

“And you’ll abide by their decision?” Deaton asks, watching him closely.

“Ask me again once we know what it is,” Jackson says.

Deaton rubs a hand over his face. “Again, not exactly encouraging.”

“Yeah, but that isn’t Jackson being a warlock,” Danny says, with a half-smile on his face. “That’s just Jackson being Jackson.”

Jackson scowls and elbows him in the ribs. Danny smirks and blows him a kiss.

Stiles pours himself another mug of coffee and says, “I’d like to testify before the Druidic Council. Just so I can make the events clear and corroborate Jackson’s account of them.”

Deaton sighs. “All right. That should be fine.”

Before much longer, their plates are clear and everyone is finishing off their coffee. Derek settles the bill and they start to leave in clumps. The pack is headed back to the den; everyone has gotten the day off from jobs and responsibilities so they can watch movies and be lazy all day. As they’re drifting apart, Jackson walks up to Lydia and says, “Hey. Talk to you for a sec?”

“Okay,” Lydia says. She stops walking, but doesn’t move away from the others.

Jackson gets the hint, and his cheeks flush slightly pink, but he doesn’t let it stop him. “I’m sorry. For what I did to you. I was a complete piece of shit. You don’t have to forgive me or anything, I just want you to know that I’m really sorry, and I’ll never do anything like that again, to anyone.”

“Thank you, Jackson,” Lydia says. “I appreciate that a lot.”

Jackson huffs out a sigh of relief and rubs a hand over the back of his head. “Okay. Uh . . . yeah. Thanks. For listening.” He turns and walks away rapidly.

Stiles glances at Lydia. She watches Jackson for a minute, then turns and gives Stiles a slight nod. Stiles jogs after him. Derek follows at a safe distance. It only takes a few moments for Stiles to catch up with Jackson. “Hey.”

Jackson gives him an annoyed glare and shoves his hands down into his pockets. “So you, uh, you remember all that stuff that happened in the basement.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He sees Jackson give him a sideways look and says, “I won’t tell anyone you’re a wonderful tenor if you don’t tell anyone I had a temper tantrum over my sandwich having mustard on it.”

“Deal,” Jackson says immediately, and he almost smiles.

“So . . .” Stiles says. “You remember back when I said you would never be part of our pack, ever?” he asks, and Jackson gives him a glare. “Well, I think we can safely say that I never would have anticipated even a tenth of all this shit happening, so . . .” He sees that Jackson is still glowering, and puts a more serious face on. “There’s a place for you here. If you want it.”

Jackson scoffs. “You kidding?” he asks. “I’ve seen how touchy-feely you guys are. You’d probably try to _hug_ me or something if I joined your pack.”

Stiles has to bite back a grin. “It’s a distinct possibility, yeah.”

“Pass,” Jackson says. But then he becomes serious, too. “It’s enough to just . . . yeah. You know.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says.

“Besides, I’d wind up bailing your ass out of trouble all the time. I’ve got better ways to spend my life.”

“Probably true,” Stiles says cheerfully. “Still. The offer stands.”

“Yeah, whatever, Stilinski.” Jackson shakes his head. “C’mon, Wilma,” he adds, and turns a corner without another word. Stiles just shakes his head and watches him go for a few minutes before he heads back to join the others.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Jackson tells his parents everything. It’s a relief he hadn’t expected, even though it takes hours. He sits there with a cup of hot chocolate his mother made him while Tanya watches cartoons with Wilma, who makes an excellent baby sitter. Mike rubs a hand over his face when he talks about the way feeling unwanted had plagued him, and Connie cries when he tells them about the things he had done while under the influence of black magic.

He tells them about how he nearly killed Danny and how Stiles decided to spare his life when he easily could have – and maybe should have – just put him down. He talks about the way Deaton helped him find a place to ground himself from, and how much knowing the story of his birth parents had helped him. He tells them all about magic and how it works and what it feels like and the kinds of things he can do. He talks about getting Wilma as his familiar and how much it helped, and how having Tanya to look out for had further stabilized him. He tells them about Eli and Marzanna and everything that had happened in the last few days.

“So that . . . that demon . . . it’s still inside you?” Connie asks, and her hands twitch a little as she crosses herself.

“Yeah, sort of,” Jackson says, and shakes his head. “It’s not _in_ me. It’d be more accurate to say it’s _with_ me. Like, you know, a little shoulder devil.”

“This isn’t funny, young man,” Connie chokes out.

“Look, uh, don’t freak out,” Jackson says. “It’s not a demon, like, not the way you think of them. We just don’t have a better name for them. It’s like . . . it’s a spirit, okay? Like a creature of energy. It’s not evil, it’s just amoral. It doesn’t believe in petty concepts like good and evil.”

Connie and Mike exchange a look. Mike says, hesitantly, “It won’t hurt you?”

“Well, I won’t let it,” Jackson says. “But no. I mean, we get along okay. There are stories of people who’ve formed symbiotic relationships with demons that have lasted decades. It’s not _always_ the kind of thing where it . . . takes over. You just have to arm wrestle it into having respect for you, that’s all.”

Mike lets out a breath. “Well . . . if you’re sure. I mean, God knows you know a lot more about this stuff than we do. Though a lot of things do make sense in retrospect . . .”

“Yeah, Beacon Hills is a pretty weird fuckin’ place,” Jackson agrees.

“Language, Jackson, for goodness’ sake,” Connie says. “You know that the day before you disappeared, Tanya was calling some character on a cartoon an ‘ass face’.”

Jackson bites back a grin. “That’s my girl,” he says.

“Oh, you’re terrible,” Connie says, laughing despite herself. “She’s going to go to preschool and start swearing up a storm and everyone’s going to think I’m a horrible mother.”

“No one will think that, trust me,” Jackson says. “And if they do, I’ll beat the shit out of them. Nobody talks about my mom that way.”

Connie leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

“What’s going to happen with this Druidic Council?” Mike asks, still frowning. “It sounds sort of like a trial. Is it?”

“Yeah,” Jackson says. “Deaton will be the prosecutor. Wanna come be my legal defense?”

“Absolutely,” Mike says. “I’ll talk rings around the bastards.”

Jackson smirks at his father. “Seriously, though, I think it’ll be fine. I mean, okay, technically I broke a few rules, but with magic it’s the _intent_ that matters. I mean, there are a few lines you can’t cross, like you can’t murder someone with magic no matter how good your intentions are because that leaves, like, major stains on your mojo. But this . . . given the reasons I did it, and the fact that Stiles has offered to speak up for me, I think I’ll be fine. They’ll put me on probation, make sure Deaton keeps an eye on me.”

“Won’t they want to . . . to exorcise you?” Connie asks. “Is that the proper term?”

“Yeah,” Jackson says. “They might. So what? I don’t need this thing.”

 _/ How kind of you to say so, /_ Marzanna remarks, clearly amused. _/ If they try to exorcise you, I’ll leave of my own volition and pick you back up again later. They’ll never know the difference, trust me. /_

 _/ Super, /_ Jackson replies.

“I’m still coming with you,” Mike says. “Whether you actually need a legal defense team or not.”

“If you really feel it’s necessary,” Jackson says, with a dramatic roll of his eyes that makes Connie laugh quietly. “But that won’t be until later. Now, if you guys don’t mind, I have a pressing engagement with a three-legged dog and a stick. Gotta burn off some of that energy she’s got from being pent up for days or she’s going to lick me to death.”

“Well, we should go to the park,” Connie says standing up. “It’s a lovely day. Let’s all go together!”

Jackson just rolls his eyes again and then slings an arm around his mother’s shoulders. “Okay, Mom,” he says. “Whatever you say.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

“You know what I want to do today?” Derek asks, leaning in to breathe Stiles’ scent as he gets behind the wheel of the Jeep.

“What do you want to do today?” Stiles replies.

“I want to play Trivial Pursuit,” Derek says. “With you. I want you to kick my _ass_ with all the random bullshit you have no business knowing.”

Stiles grins widely. “Oh, I will kick your ass,” he says. “Lydia will still beat me, though.”

“She’s a trivia machine,” Derek agrees.

Stiles drives a few blocks in silence. “Not that I don’t want to sit around and play trivia games with the pack all afternoon, but can we make a quick stop first?”

“Sure,” Derek says, and starts to ask where, but then he sees the set of Stiles’ shoulders, smells the way sorrow has permeated his scent, and realizes he doesn’t have to ask. Stiles drives another few miles and then stops outside a small cemetery. He gets out of the car and walks through the graveyard without saying anything. Derek folds Stiles’ hand in his and walks with him. The rest of the pack has pulled up in their cars behind them, but they maintain a respectful distance.

Stiles stops at the gravestone that reads ‘Claudia Stilinski, 1971 – 2003.’ He sits down beside it, folding his legs Indian-style. Derek sits down behind him, letting Stiles’ back rest against his chest.

“I miss her like crazy so much of the time,” Stiles finally says, “but this week it was like . . . I realized how much the sorrow had faded. Not that I’m not still sad she’s gone, but I can look back on my memories of her and smile and just be glad that I had such an amazing mother, even though it was only for eight years. I can watch my dad be happy with Melissa and think that’s awesome instead of resenting it, like I would have when I was younger. I can see the way everything about her shaped who I am, and think about how, how _intensely_ my mother loved, loved life and her family and everything. I can do that now, but for a few days this week, God, that pain and loss was just as fresh as it was the day after she died.”

Derek gives him a little squeeze and says nothing.

“And I guess I just . . . wanted to thank you,” Stiles says. “You were really amazing this week in general, but especially that day, the day I was nine and missed her so bad. I wish you had been there when it really happened, because what you said helped me so much.”

“I just thought about what I wish someone had said to me,” Derek says quietly.

Stiles nods and lets out a breath. “It’s a lot to unpack, I guess. But thanks.” He turns slightly so he can bump his forehead against Derek’s temple. “I don’t remember a lot of what happened with Eli last night. I guess by that point I was just too young to really comprehend what was happening around me. Peter gave me the lowdown. And I want you to know, I wasn’t afraid of you. He was wrong about what he said. I mean, obviously I was freaked out and you were a dude with fangs and what the fuck was that about, but . . . I always knew you. No matter if I was fifteen or nine or one, every time I looked at you, I knew you. I could _feel_ what we were to each other, even if I didn’t understand it or know why it was there. I just wanted you to know that. It doesn’t matter what happens; no one is ever going to take me away from you.”

Derek feels a lot of the tension go out of his shoulders. “Thanks. That helps. A lot.”

After a moment, Stiles smiles up at him. “Do you think my mom is watching us from Heaven? The way Peter talked about it, I guess everyone’s all reunited and chill up there, right?”

Derek laughs quietly. “Yeah. I bet she’s pulling her hair out.”

“Are you kidding? My mom thinks I’m awesome.” Stiles springs to his feet. “She’s up there with your parents and Laura and they watch the shit we get up to and brag to everyone else in Heaven about how badass their kids turned out to be.”

“Oh, I bet,” Derek says, getting to his feet as well. “They send postcards down to Gerard and Kate in Hell to tell them how much ass we kick.”

“Like they don’t already know,” Stiles says, laughing delightedly. He grabs Derek’s hand and swings their arms back and forth. They rejoin the rest of the pack and Stiles says, “Let’s head back to the den so I can make muffins and kick everyone’s butt at Trivial Pursuit,” he says.

“Yeah, maybe you’ll luck out and get a question about geology and finally put those two semesters to some use,” Scott teases him.

“What! Rocks are interesting!” Stiles protests, and everybody laughs.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


End file.
